CHAPTER 17

TEHRAN—DAY 8

I used my iPhone to replicate the photos Professor James Fouraz had given me and stored them in a file marked “Recipes.” I e-mailed the file in full to one of a half-dozen untraceable e-mail addresses that only Mr. Elliot had access to. The photos provided exactly the kind of pieces I needed to fill in the puzzle of Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program: shipments of yellow cake uranium to Qom and the delivery of a long-range ballistic missile to Natanz. Huge. That’s what intel was: first you unearth the puzzle pieces, then you put the pieces together so the naysayers don’t have a leg to stand on when the bombs start to drop.

The clock ticking in my head just got a little faster. The photos were priceless, but they had to be substantiated. Time for boots on the ground in Qom and Natanz.

“Anything else?” I asked. Professor Fouraz had already written his death warrant. He wasn’t going to hold anything back now. I could see it on his face.

“An audio link,” he said. He held up a BlackBerry Curve, a generation old but still powerful. “Everything I know on one tape. If you could share an e-mail address, please.”

Now it was time for a demonstration of good faith on my part. I gave him another of my untraceable e-mail addresses and then my assurance. “Only two people have access to it. Me and a man who’ll know exactly what to do with it.”

“It cannot be made public until the professor is safely out of the country,” Yousef Bagheri said, pinning me with his dark eyes.

“You have my word.”

“And mine,” Charlie said. I was glad he chimed in. I could see that the MEK chief respected Charlie. They had probably done business a hundred times. When you’re a renegade trying to fund an outlaw political organization, you naturally do business with a renegade who has the connections to do so.

Professor Fouraz collected his photos. “I should have more soon,” he said. “People are coming out of the woodwork.”

“Very good,” I replied.

Yousef Bagheri placed his hands on the table. “If there is nothing else, then I’ll ask you to keep me abreast of your plans, Mr. Moreau.”

“I’d like nothing better. Only one small problem, Mr. Bagheri.” Now it was my time to pin him with my eyes. He held them without blinking as I described the evidence suggesting a traitor in his operation. I gave him credit for that. I could also see his teeth grinding and the worry lines stretching out around his eyes.

“We’re working it twenty-four/seven from our end.” I tipped my head in Charlie’s direction. “I want you working it twenty-four/seven on your end.”

Bagheri grimaced. It was like someone had just sucker punched him. Eventually, he made a brisk gesture that might have been taken for a nod. “I won’t sleep till he’s found.”

He reached out his hand to me. I shook it. Not that I was dying to shake the man’s hand, but I had learned one thing in my years of running black ops: never alienate a potential ally, and never make an enemy unless it helps your cause.

I shook the professor’s for the same reason. It wasn’t about gratitude. I would use him until he had nothing left to give. And then I’d push to the edge and squeeze him one last time just to be sure he didn’t have anything left to give.

I slid out of the booth, and Charlie followed. “Be in touch,” he said to the MEK boss. He gave Fouraz a respectful nod. And then we were gone.

Charlie and I returned to Tehran and bunked in a new safe house in the Pamenar district, where the mix of old European architecture and corner markets gave you a feeling of prosperity that might or might not have been reality. Our rooms were on the second floor of an apartment house that looked like it had been transported from Paris. I half expected to see the Seine rolling slowly past when I pushed aside the curtain and glanced out. Instead, I saw an empty street that should have been alive with couples strolling hand-in-hand and street café’s serving espressos and lattes.

One of Charlie’s guys had left food and bottled water on the table. I cracked the water and drank half of it down. The food could wait.

I took out my iPhone. First, I sent Mr. Elliot a text: Lazy day river, two-on-two. “Lazy day river” was code for the Yahoo e-mail account that I’d shipped Professor Fouraz’s pictures to. “Two-on-two” told him to look for a second e-mail with the audio link that Fouraz had forwarded. Then I sent the entire package on to General Tom Rutledge as well, with a note that read: Visiting day tomorrow.

The general would fast track the photos with the CIA’s nuclear assessment team, and they would see exactly the same thing that I saw. Great stuff, but not enough to justify a military attack, no matter how smart the bombs or precise the strike. They would need two things: the exact status of the activities taking place in Qom and Natanz and specific attack coordinates that allowed for the most surgical strikes possible. Piece of cake.

I carried my food over to Charlie’s room, and we ate in silence.

The one thing Charlie’s guys had provided for him that they hadn’t thought to give me was a bottle of brandy. He filled two glasses with two-finger measures, and we made a silent toast.

Charlie rolled the brandy around his glass and then held it under his nose. “Ah,” he said, his first word in twenty minutes. Then he drank. I wasn’t quite so sophisticated in my approach, but that did nothing to diminish my appreciation for the drink as the warmth of it spread in my stomach.

“So?” he said after another minute. “What’s the plan?”

My first instinct was to keep everything close to my chest. The closer, the less messy, and things had gotten plenty messy over the last week or so. On the other hand, I still needed Charlie, and so far he’d been there at every turn. I’d asked him for his trust, and he’d delivered.

“Visiting day tomorrow.” Same as my message to Rutledge.

“Qom,” he said simply.

“No choice.” I gave him a brief outline of my plans to infiltrate a facility that, by all evidence, was hidden beneath a high school housing a thousand students.

“A school. That’s as fucked as it gets.” He unwound from his chair and stood up. He padded across the room to a teapot resting on top of a hot plate. He poured two cups. He handed one to me and said, “Let’s talk strategy.”

“Qom is southwest some ninety miles. We set up shop outside the city.”

“I’ve got a place,” Charlie said.

“I go in a couple of hours after dark. Not so late as to pique anyone’s interest, but not before things have settled down at the school.” I glanced at Charlie. “You’re my backup.”

“Let’s get a map in here.” Charlie buzzed one of the guys in his crew and told him to bring in a computer. “With a plug-in,” I heard him say.

In less than five minutes, we had a detailed map of Qom and the surrounding countryside up on the room’s television screen. Charlie invited two of his team to join us. The first I had seen at the surveillance site this morning, the stubby guy with the bow tie. “You remember Amur.” We nodded.

The other was a woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six by my estimate. She was intense, sinewy, and tight-lipped. She wore canvas-colored cargo pants and an olive tank top. Captivating. She had soldier written all over her. “This is Jeri,” was all Charlie said. “She’s our eyes and ears from Qom. Runs my operation there.”

We shook hands. Jeri settled in front of the map.

She pointed to a village on the outskirts of the city. “Seyfabad. We have a warehouse there with transportation and supplies. Your Russian delivery is already there.”

“Excellent. Thanks.”

“You have a French passport, yes?”

“I’m a tourist with a thirty-day visa.” I opened my coat and extracted Richard Moreau’s passport. I held it out.

She studied it like someone who had needed similar false credentials. “Good. Very good. There are a dozen French companies in Qom and who knows how many French scholars at the university. We also get a steady stream of French tourists.”

“They’re some of my best customers,” Charlie said with a proud grin.

“Of course they are. Cheap bastards,” I said, matching his grin.

Jeri handed back the passport. “ETD?”

I glanced back at the map illuminated on the television screen and said, “We’ll leave in the morning, first light. I need some sleep. And we don’t want to be on the road in the middle of the night. Too obvious.”

“Agree,” Charlie said.

We were on the road at 7:07 A.M. according to my watch. Jeri drove and seemed perturbed by our late departure. I took this as a good sign and apologized. She glanced at me in the rearview mirror and nodded.

She handed Charlie a manila envelope and said, “Photos of the school from twenty-two different angles. If there’s a full-blown uranium enrichment facility somewhere in the area, they’re doing a great job of concealing it.”

Charlie sat in the front seat, smoking a black cigarette. Jeri kept the window cracked. We had traded the Honda for a Jeep Cherokee, and I was spread out in back with my backpack. Charlie’s computer guy had forwarded a file containing the photos of the school, a blueprint of the interior, and a detailed street map of the area surrounding the school to my iPhone. I had added these to the aerial photos that the NSA had provided me.

“I thought you might want to see the originals,” Jeri said of the photos.

Charlie broke open the envelope and handed me nearly fifty photos. Qom was ninety or so miles southwest of Tehran down Highway 7, a stretch of asphalt through flat and arid desert dotted with neat, two-story farmhouses amid groves of olives and pistachios. Seyfabad was eight miles closer.

“It’s good you’re going in as a researcher,” Jeri said as I studied the photos. “Anyone with an interest in Shia studies is considered, well, I was going to say a friend, but that’s a bit of an exaggeration.”

“Less of an enemy?” I suggested.

Jeri shrugged. “Close enough.”

We drove in silence after that. I placed the photos on the seat next to me and tried to match them up with the blueprint of the school’s interior. We were halfway to Seyfabad when we spotted a convoy of panel trucks heading in the same direction. From a distance, the trucks looked damn similar to ones I had seen in Professor Fouraz’s photos—trucks he suspected were carrying yellow cake uranium.

“Ease back,” I said to Jeri. The trucks had an escort of unmarked Nissan SUVs, and it would not have surprised me at all if they were filled with men in National Security uniforms. “We know where they’re going.”

Jeri was not happy about slowing down, but she only had ten minutes to fume before reaching Seyfabad. It was a dumpy commercial hamlet that showed only mild signs of life at this time in the morning. Charlie’s warehouse was one of ten or twelve served by a railroad. His stood out from the rest because there was a small helicopter moored on a concrete pad out back, a pen with guard dogs, and a man patrolling the roof.

Charlie Amadi ran a very tight criminal operation that moved everything from electronics to gourmet food, but he was also a serious businessman. One look at his warehouse and the store of legitimate and illegitimate wares inside—everything from athletic shoes to gas barbecues—told you that he could probably stay afloat for real even if the drugs, liquor, and arms went south. Which they never would, of course.

There were pallets stacked to the ceiling—I didn’t ask what they contained—three forklifts, and a shipping office. That’s where we huddled. That’s where the crate from the Russian mafia had been stored. It looked pretty innocuous from the outside. Jeri and I used crowbars to crack it open. Inside it were two very ordinary-looking metal suitcases banded with leather straps and brass buckles. The buckles may have looked ordinary, but without the appropriate codes, they couldn’t be opened without rendering the device inside useless. Good thing Mr. Elliot had provided me with the codes.

“What do we got here, Jake?” Charlie’s voice had a resigned and fatalistic edge to it. “You gonna tell us what we helped you smuggle into the country?”

“The Russians call them suitcase bombs. One-kiloton nukes, Charlie. Every intelligence agency’s worst nightmare.” Might as well spell it out.

“No way,” Jeri said. She stepped up and ran a hand over the cases. “These things are just … just what? Propaganda, right? Legend?”

“Do these look like legends to you?” I said.

“And you’re taking one of these inside Qom with you, aren’t you?” Charlie said. Not even close to a question.

“It’s just a backup, Charlie,” I said. “Failure’s not an option. If I don’t get out, I take the place down with me.”

“You’re crazy,” he whispered.

“No, not crazy. Brilliant,” Jeri said. “I like it. Let’s do this.”

My kind of girl. I grabbed one of the suitcases by the handle. Hefted it. “Legend” had it that there were a hundred more of these in existence. Fifty-pound nightmares.

We spent the rest of the day finalizing my plan and talking about our communications pattern once I was on the move. Jeri equipped each of us with a prepaid phone straight from Charlie’s inventory.

“Text messages only,” I said. I thought about that for a moment and added, “Unless all hell breaks, of course.”

At 7:00 P.M., Jeri and I packed the suitcase in the back of the Cherokee, and she drove me into town. She dropped me in the market district, which every tourist crazy enough to come to Qom was obliged to visit. Qom was the religious center of Shai Islam. The city was renowned for its architecture. The horizon in every direction was spiced with mosques and golden minarets, shrines and tombs, religious schools and government buildings. The city made little pretense of modernity the way Tehran did. It was the home of fifty thousand religious scholars from all over the world, including France. That was my cover: Richard Moreau, researcher extraordinaire, specializing in religious anthropology. I hoped I wouldn’t have to lean on it too heavily.

I stopped in a market café to orient myself, set the suitcase on the floor next to me, and hooked my backpack over the back of my chair. I ordered a dish of rice with spiced chicken. I washed it down with a bottle of sparking water. Then I ordered coffee with cream, opened a day-old newspaper, and watched the sun begin to set.

Everyone knew there was a uranium enrichment facility in Qom. Three years earlier, French and English sources had picked up signs that someone was tunneling into the side of a mountain in the desert outside the holy city. And yes, there was a facility there. The debate was whether or not it was being used for peaceful purposes, as The Twelver wanted us to believe. But the size and configuration of this new find, disguised by the Vocational School of Engineering and Science, was completely inconsistent with a peaceful program. My job was to confirm the inconsistency.

I went into my iPhone and opened the photo files of the school and the processing facility, the one file from the NSA, and the one Jeri had provided me. I memorized the layout. The major heat plume recorded by satellite imagery pinpointed a source from inside—or under—the school’s main building. A long, hot streak connected this building to an adjacent one, a student center according to the photos, and a very big student center at that. This was the building, according to Professor Fouraz, where the yellow cake uranium had been delivered. For all we really knew, the trucks were making a delivery of cheese pizzas to the school cafeteria. Right, Jake.

I was willing to bet my house that the long, hot streak revealed a tunnel connecting the two buildings.

The Agency forwarded what they had on the facility. The Iranian Ministry of Education promoted the place as a vocational school for young men and women. Though the school had been in operation for three years, there was no record of anyone who had yet graduated.

By this time, the market was attracting families out for the evening. Tots on bikes, men smoking, women in baggy abayas pushing strollers. It was a scene of urban tranquility, though I wondered about the scruples of a government that constructed a nuclear weapons plant practically under the feet of so many innocent people. Actually, there wasn’t much to wonder about: evil was evil.

The crowd thinned out and night’s darkness thickened.

At 9:15 P.M., I closed my paper, hailed a cab, and placed the suitcase on the backseat next to me. I gave the driver an address a quarter of a mile from the school, at the edge of a residential neighborhood. Simple logic: if you see a man carrying a suitcase, you assume he lives nearby and is on the way home from the bus stop. I hiked north in the direction of the school, my iPhone feeding me directions.

Considering the secrecy surrounding the uranium processing plant, the Iranians couldn’t be obvious in providing security. If the place was meant to be a school, it had to look like a school. Couldn’t be surrounded by a cordon of heavily armed guards. Security systems had to be discreet.

The school complex sat on the edge of the city, on the banks of the Qom River, the desert and low-lying hills forming a backdrop to the north. It was bordered on the south—my left—by a cramped neighborhood of typical lower-income homes. Flat roofs, tiny windows, and mud-stucco walls. A wide dirt road separated the neighborhood from a chain-link fence surrounding the schoolyard, and I paused three hundred feet away. I set the suitcase down next to the trunk of an olive tree. I took my Zeiss digital telescope from my jacket pocket and connected it to my iPhone to survey the area.

The meager illumination came from light sneaking past the curtains of the houses and from the distant security lamps above a guardhouse along the front of the schoolyard.

On the other side of the fence stretched two soccer fields of scraggly grass. Two massive single-story buildings sat two hundred yards inside the fence. Both were constructed from cinder blocks and coated with reflective paint that gave them a reddish brown tint in the light of a new moon.

By my calculations, the school and all the acreage inside the fence—or what lay beneath it all—was probably large enough to conceal a facility whose sole intent was the enrichment of uranium, and not for the wholesome, peaceful purposes that Iran’s government would have liked the world to believe.

I studied the fence. It was woven from top to bottom with innocuous-looking electrical wires that could only have one purpose: conduits for electric current. Probably not strong enough to harm either man or animal, but sensitive enough to set off alarms at police and security outposts both inside the facility and out.

From this vantage I could see an entrance adjacent to the nearest guardhouse. Parked just beyond the guardhouse and well inside the fence was a collection of excavators, trucks, and buses: not an assortment of vehicles you saw at every school in America, and probably not here in Iran, either. I spotted two other guardhouses, one on either side of the schoolyard.

The farthermost of these protected an entrance and road that curved away from the city in the direction of Highway 7. The road from this entrance seemed to fork at a point less than a quarter of a mile from the school. The left fork sloped into a tunnel, which disappeared under ground, away from the prying eyes of satellites hovering 150 miles out in space.

I was still staring at the images brought to life by my telescope when a low rumble shook the earth. I froze.