32

It was just after midnight when Zalinsky let them go.

They had spent nearly fourteen hours poring over the briefing book and talking through various aspects of the mission. It was now February 12. They would meet again at a safe house in Dubai on the evening of Monday, February 14, he told them. There he would give them several more days of briefings before sending them in. In the meantime, Zalinsky suggested they get lost for the weekend—the Caribbean, Cancún, Cozumel, someplace that didn’t start with a C; he didn’t really care.

“Enjoy yourselves,” he ordered. “Clear your heads. Get some fresh air. It might be your last break for a while.”

Eva immediately started texting someone to make plans. David wondered if she had a boyfriend or a fiancé and surprised himself with the twinge of disappointment he felt. They had, after all, only just met. But he said good-bye and left the building without asking any questions. He didn’t want to seem too forward or too interested so quickly. He would find out in due time where she had gone and with whom, he figured. He and Eva were about to spend a lot of time together. There was no point stumbling at the starting gate.

As he stepped out of the CIA’s main building and headed to the parking garage to pick up his company loaner for the weekend—a Chevy Impala—he stared up at a million diamonds sparkling on the dazzling black canvas above him. He breathed in the brisk, still, cloudless night air and tried to enjoy the beauty and the silence. He was energized by the prospect of the mission ahead of him, but at the same time he suddenly felt alone in the world. He didn’t have a girlfriend. He didn’t have a best friend. He hardly had any friends to hang out with aside from Zalinsky and his Mobilink rent-a-friends in Karachi. He tried to think about the last time he was really happy, and it inevitably brought him back to thoughts of his time with Marseille in Canada. Before 9/11. Before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Before joining the CIA. It was so long ago, and the memories were painful. He tried to think of something else.

There was, he realized, nowhere to go except home. He was rarely in the U.S. these days, and he hadn’t really kept in touch with anyone in the States aside from his parents. His brothers had little interest in his overseas life. They would have, of course, if he told them that he worked for the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. That he’d been hunting down the upper echelons of al Qaeda’s leaders to have them assassinated. That he was now on a mission to penetrate the inner circle around Iranian president Ahmed Darazi and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Hamid Hosseini.

But he couldn’t tell them any of that without going to prison. So even with his family, he stuck with his cover—that he was running his own little computer consulting practice in Munich. And Azad and Saeed’s lack of caring did have an upside. It prevented David from having to lie so much to their faces.

His parents, on the other hand, were a different story. They cared a great deal about David’s work and personal life, and their curiosity had made things significantly more complex. For one thing, it produced twinges of guilt every time he told them anything other than the truth. His mother, in particular, constantly peppered him with questions. She wanted him to call more, to write more, to come home for Christmas (though they had never celebrated Christian holidays growing up). His father was almost as persistent, urging him at the minimum to come home for the annual fishing trip to Canada. But there was nothing David wanted less than to go back to that island and relive memories of Marseille.

So he always had a million excuses. Business trips, conferences, new clients, old clients, billing problems—the list went on and on. He hated the secrecy and the deceit and the distance, but he really didn’t see another way. Increasingly, however, he worried that if he didn’t go home soon, his parents would make good on their threats to just fly to Munich one day and “pop in.” Given that David didn’t actually even live in Munich—his apartment, phone, and mailbox there were all simply to maintain his cover story—that would be a disaster.

It was time to go home, he concluded. So he signed out the Impala and headed north.

He drove all night.

He arrived in Syracuse just under seven hours later, pulled into his parents’ driveway—tucked away in a little cul-de-sac off East Genesee Street—and finally turned off the engine. As a light snow fell, he stared at his childhood home. He knew he should go in. He could see lights beginning to come on inside. He could picture his mother padding about in her robe and slippers, making tea and toast for his father and softly singing Persian melodies with the Food Network on in the background.

But David wasn’t ready to go domestic just yet. His body might have come home, but his head was still back at Langley, swimming with numbers.

• 5,000—the number of miles of fiber-optic cable networks in Iran in the year 2000.

• 48,000—the number of miles of fiber-optic cable networks there in 2008.

• 4,000,000—the number of cell phones in Iran in 2004.

• 43,000,000—the number of cell phones there in 2008.

• 54,000,000—the number of cell phones there now.

• 70,000,000—the combined number of Iranians in country and in exile.

• 100,000,000—the number of SMS messages sent daily in Iran.

• 200,000,000—the number of text messages that would be sent daily in Iran in the next twelve to eighteen months.

• $9.2 billion—the revenue produced by the Telecommunication Company of Iran, or Iran Telecom, in 2009.

• $12.4 billion—the projected revenue for Iran Telecom in 2014.

Zalinsky believed such explosive growth in the Iranian telecommunications arena afforded the Agency a unique window of opportunity. The regime in Tehran was investing heavily in modernizing and expanding its civilian communications networks. Simultaneously, they were spending aggressively on a parallel track to create a secure and robust military communications system.

As Iran feverishly tried to become a regional nuclear power—and soon a world power—the Supreme Leader wanted his country to have state-of-the-art voice and data networks for all sectors of society, but especially for the military’s system of command and control. To get there as quickly as possible, the Iranians were reaching out in an unprecedented way to European technology companies, offering them contracts worth billions of dollars to upgrade Iran’s hardware and software and provide them with much-needed technical assistance.

Iran Telecom, Zalinsky had explained, had recently awarded a huge contract to Nokia Siemens Networks, requiring all manner of NSN engineers and other experts to enter Iran, make specific telecommunications upgrades, and train their Iranian counterparts. NSN, in turn, had contracted Munich Digital Systems to build much of the necessary infrastructure. Since the CIA already had agents, including David, embedded within MDS, this had created—virtually overnight—the opportunity to put boots on the ground, to place Farsi-speaking Agency operatives inside Iran Telecom, the mother ship of the modernization effort.

Zalinsky had shown David a story in the Wall Street Journal reporting that the Iranian regime was seeking, with NSN’s and MDS’s help, to develop “one of the world’s most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.” This effort went far beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections, enabling authorities not only to block communication but to gather—and sometimes alter—information about individuals.

David recalled another intriguing headline from the business section of the New York Times: “Revolutionary Guard Buys Majority Stake in Iran Telecom.” That story, he knew, had eventually made it into the president’s daily intelligence briefing. David’s heart still raced as he recalled the text of the article in his mind’s eye and considered its implications in light of the NSN/MDS deal.

The transaction essentially brought Iran’s telecommunications sector under the elite military force’s control. The article explained that the purchase would allow the Guard in times of crisis to “interrupt mobile phone networks” and “hinder the opposition’s organization.”

The last paragraph of the story intrigued David most. It noted that the IRGC was essentially “free from any state oversight” and was “accountable only to the Supreme Leader, who has the final say on all state matters in Iran.”

If the Times story was accurate, then Zalinsky was right. If the CIA could penetrate the inner circle running Iran Telecom, perhaps they really did have a shot at penetrating the inner circle running the Revolutionary Guard. Whether that trail could lead David into the Supreme Leader’s office, getting him hanged or shot in the face, was a question mark at best. But as David watched the snow sticking to his windshield, he imagined the prospect of actually being able to intercept the most private phone calls of Iran’s Supreme Leader and the calls of his closest staff and advisors. What if Langley could actually read the e-mail and text messages of Iran’s highest leaders? What if they could follow messages coming to and from computers and phones inside Iran’s clandestine nuclear facilities? The very notion made him want to get into Iran now. He could hardly wait. They had to move fast, before the Israelis struck.

Suddenly there was a knock on his passenger-side window. It was his father, standing there in the freezing cold in his pajamas, holding the Saturday morning edition of the Post-Standard newspaper in his hand and staring at him in disbelief.

“David? Is that you?”