79

En Route to Tehran, Iran

Every Muslim was commanded to make hajj.

As David had thoroughly studied during his college years in Munich, hajj was the fifth of the five pillars to which every follower of Islam must submit.

The first pillar was saying the shahada, the basic profession of faith in Allah and Muhammad as his prophet. The second was performing salat, praying five times a day at the prescribed times. The third was zakat, the giving of alms to the poor. The fourth was sawm, fasting from food, drink, and sexual relations during the daylight hours of the month of Ramadan and at other times in the Islamic calendar. But it was the hajj that was the most difficult and thus the most honored act of the five.

David had never done it, but every year, despite enormous poverty and deprivation throughout the Islamic world, more than 1.5 million foreign Muslims joined roughly an equal number of Saudi Muslims to make their pilgrimage to the city of Mecca. Considered a holy city, Mecca was the epicenter of Islam, the city where Muhammad was born in AD 570, the city where he claimed he first began receiving revelations from Allah, a city whose people tried to resist and crush Islam in its infancy after Muhammad moved his base camp to nearby Medina, and the city that was ultimately conquered by Muhammad and his army of ten thousand mujahideen in AD 630.

After the conquest, Muhammad declared that no infidel could ever enter Mecca, but every year Muslims entered in wave after wave, fully doubling the normal population of the city that once had little, if any, historical significance. Some came by train. Some came by bus or automobile. Others trekked across the desert. When the hotels filled up, they camped out in the thousands upon thousands of white tents erected by the Saudi government. When the tents filled up, they slept on floors or out under the stars. Most saved their entire lives for one opportunity to pray at the Kaaba, the black, granite, cube-shaped building that stood in the heart of Al-Masjid Al-Haram, the Sacred Mosque, also known as the Grand Mosque.

But every Muslim knew the hajj took place in the fall. This was late February, and no one had ever seen anything like this.

The Islamic world had been electrified by the announcement that the Twelfth Imam had returned and would soon appear publicly. With rumors spreading of the great signs and wonders he was doing, Muslims were converging on Mecca in a way that threatened to overwhelm all of the normal systems.

It was still the middle of the night, but David decided to use his rental car and drive rather than fly from Hamadan back to Tehran. Rather than get cut off from the flow of news and information in airports and on a plane, he wanted to be able to listen to the continuing coverage from Mecca on the radio. He also wanted to be able to transport the Farsi Bible that Dr. Birjandi had given him without some security guard at the airport finding it in his luggage and making a big deal of it.

One report that caught his attention on the way came from the official Saudi news agency. Every seat on every flight coming into the kingdom in the next seventy-two hours was full. A spokesman for Saudi Arabian Airlines said they were doing everything they possibly could to add charter flights, but he pleaded for patience and understanding.

So far, David noticed, the palace in Riyadh had not put out any official statement, either positive or negative, commenting on the Twelfth Imam’s coming to Mecca. But he interpreted the efforts of the Saudi government to move so quickly to truck in hundreds of thousands of tons of food, millions of gallons of water, and tens of thousands of additional tents as a sign of the Sunni kingdom’s acceptance, however reluctant, that the Shia leader’s imminent journey to Mecca was a fait accompli.

The question was, why?

It didn’t make sense that Saudi Arabia’s Sunni leaders were countenancing this visit by the Twelfth Imam to their country at all, much less enabling it. Why was the king essentially rolling out the red carpet for a religious figure in whom he did not believe, a political leader who could in a single sermon steal his kingdom right out from under the House of Saud? Was someone forcing their hand? Were they being blackmailed?

Tehran, Iran

“What do you mean you can’t find him?”

Defense Minister Faridzadeh had been up all night, and he was apoplectic. It had been hours since he had ordered his staff to track down Najjar Malik. Since issuing the orders, Faridzadeh had been locked away in his office, consumed with poring over the final results of the nuclear warhead test. It had never dawned on him that his aides were so inept as to be unable to find the man who was now the most important figure in the Iranian nuclear program.

“We don’t even know if he is alive,” Faridzadeh’s chief of staff explained, standing in the center of his boss’s spacious corner office in the Ministry of Defense.

“Why not?”

“Hamadan is still chaos, sir. There’s not enough food or water. The roads are a disaster. The phone system is only now coming back online. Tens of thousands are dead. Over a hundred thousand have been wounded, and many of those getting medical treatment don’t have identification with them.”

“Has anyone personally gone to Dr. Malik’s apartment and knocked on the door?”

“We tried, but the apartment was completely destroyed by the earthquake.”

“No survivors?”

“None, sir.”

“So he could be at the bottom of all that rubble?”

“It’s possible, sir.”

“What about the staff at Facility 278? Have any of them heard from Dr. Malik?”

“He was at the plant the night of Dr. Saddaji’s funeral, but no one we’ve talked to has seen or heard from him since.”

Faridzadeh stared at his chief of staff and delivered his ultimatum. “You’ve got six hours to find him and bring him to me. Don’t ask for a minute more.”

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Zalinsky checked his caller ID and tensed.

“Zalinsky,” he said, picking up the phone on the third ring.

“Jack, it’s Tom Murray. I’m calling from Langley.”

“Hey, Tom.”

“We’ve got a problem,” the deputy director for operations said.

“What’s that?”

“I received a very uncomfortable call from the director.”

“What about?”

“Apparently President Jackson just got off the phone with Prime Minister Naphtali. Naphtali won’t say whether the Israelis took out Mohammed Saddaji or not. But he did say Israeli intelligence is detecting significant radiation emanating from a mountain west of Hamadan. What do you know about this?”

“Nothing concrete, sir,” Zalinsky answered, not exactly lying but not quite telling the whole truth either.

“You have a man in Hamadan right now, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Does he have indications that the Iranians may have just conducted a nuclear test there?”

“He’s hearing rumors, sir, but nothing solid.”

“Rumors?”

“Speculation,” Zalinsky said. “Hearsay. But there’s nothing to back it up.”

“The Israelis are requesting a Constant Phoenix pass over the city,” Murray said. “The president was blindsided by the request. He’s furious that no one gave him a heads-up that there was even a possibility that the earthquake could have been triggered by a nuclear weapons test. Not us, not DIA, not the Pentagon.”

“We’re working on it, sir,” Zalinsky assured the DDO.

“It’s not enough,” Murray fumed. “You need to do better, Jack. The president is ordering Constant Phoenix to head to Iran, but we won’t have data for another twenty-four hours. You need to get me something more, and fast.”

“We’re on it, sir.”

But Murray wasn’t finished. “What’s all this commotion about the coming of the Twelfth Imam?” he demanded to know. “Naphtali said the arrival of the Twelfth Imam could mean the Iranians are close to launching a strike against Israel. The Saudi ambassador was just at the White House and told the president the Iranians say the Twelfth Imam is going to give a major address in Mecca, and the king is afraid the Iranians are planning to overthrow his regime by flooding the country with Shias from Iran. Quite frankly, until today, neither the president nor I had even heard of the Twelfth Imam except as some vague Muslim concept.”

“My people are working on all that, too, sir,” Zalinsky said. “But we need more time.”

At that, Murray lost it. “We don’t have more time. You’re supposed to keep me ahead of the game. I needed something yesterday. I gave you all the money you requested—black box, no congressional oversight—and what have you given me in return? Nothing, Jack. Nothing I can use.”

Murray was right, and it made Zalinsky ill. He was failing his boss and his country at a critical moment, something that had never happened in his life. He tried to stay calm. All he had new on the Twelfth Imam was Zephyr’s memo. He cringed at the thought of sending that up the chain of command but wasn’t sure what else to do.

“I’ll get you something soon,” Zalinsky promised.

“You’ve got six hours,” Murray said. “I want a backgrounder on the Twelfth Imam and hard new intel on what’s happening in Hamadan on my desk. And I want an update every six hours after that. You need to squeeze your people, Jack. All of them. The director said he’s never seen the president so livid. He’s afraid the Israelis are going to launch any minute. You have got to get ahead of this, or there will be hell to pay.”