“AN IRANIAN NUCLEAR scientist is due in three days in Paris.” It was Thierry on the phone as usual at two a.m.
“What for?” I sat up, instantly awake.
“Some EdF conference.” EdF is Électricité de France, the world’s largest utility and the operator of the country’s fifty-eight nuclear power plants, which supply 88% of the nation’s electricity. EdF is also the world’s largest exporter of nuclear energy. French nuclear plants have an astounding safety record and give France Europe’s lowest-cost electricity plus Europe’s lowest level of greenhouse gases. It made a perfect cover for an Iranian nuclear bomb maker to attend an EdF conference on clean nuclear energy.
“When you find out?” I said, flipping the call to speaker so Anne could hear.
“He just showed up on an Air France reservation.”
“I’ll call Harris.”
“What time is it in Honolulu? Why not call your friend Mitchell?”
I’d briefly mentioned Mitchell to Thierry; they’d never met in Afghanistan. “I wish I’d known him,” Thierry had said.
Mitchell would know of any Iranian scientist working in the nuclear field. His files would know the scientist’s family, where he lived and exactly what he did, his bank account, sexual preferences and a lot of other stuff.
“I’ll call him. What’s happening your side?”
“Still mapping connections, background ... I’ll talk to EdF in the morning.”
“If he does come, make sure Air France security in Teheran searches his baggage.”
“He’s got a diplomatic passport. His baggage doesn’t get searched.”
“Tell them do it anyway.”
“It will have locks that can’t be decoded that quick.”
“Deny him a visa.”
“Upstairs says no.”
“No? What the fuck for? Who upstairs?”
“Foreign Ministry. And Interior. All those invisible assholes who run us.”
“I want names –”
“Even I don’t know. So many of these things are trade-offs.”
I climbed out of bed and headed for the kitchen. “I’ll call Mitchell now. And Harris tomorrow. What’s his name, this Iranian guy?”
“Dr. Ahmed Arawa, 52, undergrad Mosul University, PhD nuclear physics Université de Lyon, postdoc Geneva, went back to Iran in nuclear research, everything that could be classified peaceful, principally energy production.”
At the sink I filled a glass with water and drank it, hating the chemical taste. “Must be a hundred guys like him. Send me his stuff and I’ll pass it on.”
“But I haven’t told you the best part. Before he went to university he spent four years in Quds as an explosives specialist. After that he did all his studies in nuclear.”
Quds (Sepah-e quds in Persian) is the Special Forces branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. It has eight target areas, the first of which is Europe and North America, and another is Iraq, where they were responsible for the deaths of nearly a thousand US soldiers. They have been a major terrorist force in Syria and Lebanon, and responsible for numerous attacks on civilians in Israel.
Quds trains and provides weapons for Islamic terrorist forces in many countries, often brings them to Iran for intensive weapons and explosives work, then returns them to their home countries to do as much harm as possible.
When you joined Quds, as Dr. Arawa had, it was for life. You could go back to the world, but you always owed them. Whatever they wanted. Whenever they wanted.
A one-way street.
Headed our way.
“You’re going to have to keep him off that plane.”
“Not happening.”
“Or intercept it.”
“Yeah, right.”
Or maybe Dr. Arawa was working to develop peaceful Iranian nuclear energy. But he was Quds, and his background was explosives. The link between Quds and Hezbollah is deep, between the Iranian military and terrorism. On the surface this guy was working on nuclear energy. But he was also a bombmaker.
“You want to know his Quds codename? Doctor Death.”
So maybe the story Thierry’s two jihadis had told about a bomb coming to Paris was true after all.
—
“DO WE ARREST Tariq?” Tomàs said at our 07:00 meeting that morning. “He showed up with a broken jaw a half mile from the murder site, and we know that Bruno fought back. And do we bring in Nassim, the guy with his DNA on the torn keffiyeh? For a proper interrogation?”
Despite myself I grinned at the absurdity of it. “Once you arrest these guys, you have to give them lawyers, an imam, a cell phone, copies of Penthouse to wank off with and all kinds of other goodies. And they don’t have to talk for weeks. If ever.”
“Sadly true ...” Thierry said.
“Plus we alert Mustafa and everyone else, Mack and Gisèle die, Mustafa accelerates his schedule and does a hit on the Tower or an Airbus before we can stop it ...”
I was silent a moment, took a breath. “What are the chances it would be an Airbus hit on the Tower? An actual hit?”
“Jesus, they keep trying ...”
When my phone buzzed I saw it was Mitchell and went into the corridor to take it. “Yeah?”
“You alone?”
I told him where I was.
“You’ll want to tell them –”
“Tell them what?”
“Your Iranian nuclear scientist?”
“Dr. Arawa.”
“Guess where he’s just been?”
“Christ, Mitchell, get to the point!”
“Kahuta.”
“Oh fuck.”
“Oh fuck is right. The Khan Research labs.”
“Where the Pakis make their nukes and long-distance missiles.”
“And just like the Iranians were doing before we sabotaged theirs, Kahuta uses gas centrifuges to make HEU.”
HEU is Highly Enriched Uranium, essential to the production of nuclear bombs. “And,” I added, “those bastards gave the Taliban surface-to-air missiles to shoot down our guys in Afghanistan.” I took a breath, nauseated by the memory. “He was there?”
“Then – get this – he spent a week in Rawalpindia. Stayed at the Pyramid 2 Guest House but spent night and day at the labs ...”
“I remember the Pyramid 2,” I answered. Located just northeast of Rawalpindi’s sprawl, and about 100 km south of Abbottabad, where the Pakis were hiding Osama Bin Laden till our SEALS killed him, Rawalpindia is the Pakistan Institute of Science and Technology’s nuclear research center. They do everything from fuel cycle development to plutonium extraction. Everything you need to kill people.
And Dr. Arawa had just spent a week there.
Now he was coming to Paris.