CHAPTER 19

Alarms screamed around me in all directions and seemed to steal every ounce of energy from the air. I wanted to tell whoever happened to be in charge that everyone who needed to be alerted probably had been, so maybe he could hit the Off button.

Security guards rustled beneath the roof hatch. They were no doubt planning to rush me, but I also imagined that there was some debate about who was going to come through first.

There was a maintenance shed and three heating units near the center of the roof, and I ran in that direction. I pressed against the shed, circling it in a low crouch. More security guards scrambled onto the roof of an adjacent building to the south and started my way.

I flicked the safety from full auto to semiauto on the AK-47. No sense wasting bullets when I had to make every shot count. I brought the rifle to my shoulder, drew a bead on the leading guard—an easy hundred-yard shot—and squeezed off one round. He clutched his shoulder and crumbled onto the roof. It wasn’t my best shot. The rifle obviously needed a site adjustment, but at least now I had it figured: four inches left, two down.

The guard’s buddies saw him go down and sprayed the air with bullets that came nowhere close to hitting me. They grabbed their fallen comrade by the shirt collar and fell back. I had to give them credit. They might not have been very experienced, but they weren’t stupid.

All well and good, but chasing them away was nothing to celebrate. Every minute I remained on the roof was another minute for the facility’s security forces to gain strength and coordinate their attack. Soon, they’d have the numbers and the balls to come for me.

My pulse ticked upward. Eighty beats per minute. Okay Charlie, where the hell are you? I yanked the iPhone from my pocket. I stared at the triggering device: Activate or Disarm. Decision time.

The rotor blades of an approaching helicopter thrummed the air and drew my eyes away from the screen. Air cover. Now I was seriously screwed. A maintenance shed wasn’t going to do me much good against a chopper with any sort of firepower.

Time to improvise.

The copter came straight at me. 500 meters and closing. A Bell Jet Ranger. I dropped to one knee. I hit the Activate button on my iPhone. I had 30 seconds. Might as well do some damage before the fat lady sang.

I sighted down the barrel of the AK-47. One shot each for the pilot and the co-pilot. I could picture the chopper crashing into the school and exploding in flames. One hell of a distraction. But not from this range, Jake. Be patient.

I counted off the seconds and calculated the distance: 400 yards. 350. The landing light under the chopper’s nose began to flicker. The hell?

The Jet Ranger banked to the right, then orbited the building, the co-pilot in the left seat facing me. The cargo door was open. If the Ranger was armed—and every Ranger was—there would be a crewman hanging out the door with a machine gun. But the back seat was empty.

I glanced down at the iPhone’s screen: 15, 14, 13 …

Decision time. 250 yards. Wait! I eased off the trigger. I’d seen the helicopter before, and now I knew where. On the landing pad outside Charlie’s warehouse in Seyfabad. I lowered the rifle.

The co-pilot braced himself against the chopper’s doorframe and leaned out. He raised his sunglasses and pushed a boom mike down from in front of his face. There was no mistaking the mustache and broad cheeks. Charlie Amadi. He signaled me to stay down and stay put. Yeah, as if I were going somewhere without him.

I dropped the rifle and reached for my phone.

Now it was down to 5, 4, 3 … I hit the Disarm trigger. The countdown froze.

The helicopter banked hard and swooped toward me. Now I recognized the pilot. It was Jeri. I was liking the girl better and better all the time. I pressed against the shed door and prayed that the guards in the stairway would hold off for three or four more seconds.

At the last second, the Jet Ranger flared upward to bleed off airspeed. A cloud of dust lifted from the roof. Jeri leveled the copter and raked her landing skids close to me, turbine engine screeching, rotor blades churning the air.

“What are you waiting for?” she shouted.

I dived onto the backseat. The helicopter accelerated upward. The roar was deafening. I rolled into a sitting position and snapped the seat harness over my shoulders and waist. I gripped my iPhone, stared down at the screen, and activated the self-destruct mechanism on the suitcase bomb. Thank God.

Wind whipped through the open cabin. I leaned to the left and glanced out the door. Security guards burst out of the hatchway on the school roof and began firing. Bullets sprayed us from the adjacent roof, wild shots that couldn’t keep up with the forward motion of the Jet Ranger at full throttle.

I watched until we were well out of range. When I turned around, Charlie was holding out a headset for me. I slipped it over my ears.

“So?” I heard him say.

First, I held out the iPhone. He read the screen, and his eyes doubled in size. Then I pulled the phone away.

“Pay dirt,” I answered, as we disappeared over the hills west of Qom and the first hint of dawn peeked above the horizon.

An hour later. Charlie handed me hot tea, Iranian style, in a short glass with one sugar cube. My hair was still wet from a hot shower and my face tingled from a welcome shave. He, Jeri, and I had just finished a late lunch of fried spinach and eggplant with yogurt, onions, and garlic. I was dying for a cheeseburger.

We hadn’t gone back to Seyfabad, and we hadn’t returned to Tehran. We’d gone south from Qom seventy or eighty miles to Kashan. Jeri had ditched the chopper at a private airport a mile from the city. The safe house was in an old neighborhood populated by painters and sculptors and papermakers, as Charlie described it.

He was expounding on Kashan’s history. “Like everything in Iran, it’s been overrun and pillaged by the best of them. Arabs, Mongols, Persians, and who knows all. That’s what happens when you’ve been around for five thousand years.”

Jeri wore the same tank top she’d been wearing during my rescue. It showed miles of skin the color of burnished walnut; I could have stared at her all day. She said, “If you had the time, you could walk into town and find a silk scarf for your wife unlike anything you could find anywhere else in the world. But you better get it quick before the mullahs make the arts a footnote in Iranian history.”

“What’s really special about Kashan is that Natanz is only forty miles away,” Charlie said. He knew that was my next destination. “I assume that’s the plan.”

“Strike while the iron’s hot, my friend. The Revolutionary Guards will know their security has been breached. I figure I have twenty-four hours max before everything within five hundred miles of Qom is battened down tighter than a drum,” I said. I looked across at Charlie. He had chosen a hardback chair and a stiff posture. His cup and saucer were balanced in his hands like an artist with his brush and palette. “But you’ve done enough, Charlie. You and Jeri risked your necks for me back there. I won’t forget. We’re square.”

Charlie looked over at Jeri. He was grinning. She looked like she was ready to take my head off. “He’s no Persian, is he?” he said.

“No, but I like his style anyway,” she said unexpectedly.

“In our country, as fucked up as it may be, it’s the debtor who decides when a debt is paid. You’ve still got work to do, and we’ve still got a traitor to find,” he said. “I’m in for the long haul.”

“And I’m just beginning to enjoy myself,” Jeri said. “But it’s up to you, Abu.”

Abu? What the hell? Abu meant “father” in Arabic. My eyes swept the room. Charlie must have seen it on my face. But he didn’t say anything. Instead, he pulled a laptop from a case on the floor and set it up on the table.

While he was powering it up, he said, “I heard from Bagheri. You lit a fire under his ass. He’s got people searching high and low for his mole.”

I shook my head. “Bad move. All he’s going to do is make it harder for us to find the bastard.”

“Don’t I know it. But there might be an upside. He raises enough hell, it might keep Security out of our hair for a while. My guys are narrowing things down. They’re tracking twenty-six known MEK operatives who seem to have hidden agendas.”

“Moradi?” For some reason, I didn’t want it to be Moradi. He’d been chumming for the MEK in Amsterdam for thirty years. We’d partnered enough times to know we were on the same side. Or so I thought.

“Not Moradi. But Karimi and Drago keep coming to the surface,” Charlie said.

“Okay. We have to flush our guy out,” I said. “We have to set a lure for the twenty-six possibilities on our list. We have to use the communication links your guys have established to hint at various rendezvous sights around Tehran. See who bites.”

“I’m on that,” Jeri said, rising from her chair with the grace of gymnast on a balance beam. “I’ll set up a video conference with Amur.” She glanced at me. “Amur. The guy with the bow tie. We’ll have something out on the wire in an hour.”

“Keep it subtle, Jeri,” I said. “This guy’s smart. We don’t want to spook him.”

She nodded briskly—the soldier replacing the gymnast in the blink of an eye—and hustled out.

“Consider it done,” Charlie said, as if I might have misgivings about a twenty-six-year-old screwing up our counterintelligence op. Nope, not this twenty-six-year-old. I’d share a foxhole with her any day of the week. Charlie turned the computer screen my way. “Professor Fouraz came through again. He sent another batch of photographs from Natanz and a couple of audio links.”

Charlie put the photographs up on the screen. The first batch showed unmarked semi-trailers escorted by unmarked SUVs. All the men wore sunglasses and most weren’t particularly discreet about hiding their weapons: MP5 submachine guns, Beretta auto-shotguns, and the ubiquitous AK-47s.

There had been times when I ran three or four ops at a time. I could have been circling the wagons on an arms-smuggling ring in Mexico and targeting a band of Chinese heroin dealers in Washington, D.C., while working the Iranian cartel in Florida and a trafficking operation out of Bangkok. The bottom line was always intel. Gather it, package it, send it off to Mr. Elliot to analyze and act upon. It wasn’t my job to figure it all out, but figuring it all out more or less came with the territory. Figuring it out helped me plan my next move. Figuring it out kept me alive.

That’s what I was doing now—staying alive, completing the mission.

“Knowing what we know now about Qom, it has to work this way,” I said. I was really talking to myself, even though Charlie had settled in next to me on the couch. I jabbed a finger at the big rigs in the photos. “The trailers carry enriched-uranium ingots made in Qom. Once the ingots arrive in Natanz, they’re fabricated into warheads.”

I had transmitted the photos from the enrichment facility in Qom to General Rutledge and Mr. Elliot the moment we landed in Kashan, but I hadn’t heard back from either of them yet. I knew it would take some time. I had handed them intel no one had ever seen before; they were probably creaming all over themselves trying to figure out what to do with it.

Charlie clicked to the next group of photos. This batch depicted a convoy of panel trucks, again escorted by unmarked SUVs. It came with an audio link. “Let’s hear what the good professor has to say about these.”

He clicked the link. I recognized Professor Fouraz’s voice, and it didn’t take a guy trained in voice recognition to hear the strain. He was saying, “These trucks are on their way to Natanz. That I know for sure.”

“And the payload?” I asked, as if he were sitting across from us.

“From everything I have been able to find out, they’re hauling special tanks containing deuterium. Collected in the heavy-water facility at Arak.”

I waited for more, but the audio link had closed.

“That’s deducing a lot from a couple of panel trucks,” I said. Deuterium was a hydrogen isotope used to slow neutrons inside nuclear reactors: a good thing. More ominously, it was used to boost the yield of a nuclear bomb.

I clicked to a third series of pictures. These showed long cylindrical objects lashed to flatbed trailers and covered with acres of some reflective material. The shapes were identical to the one Fouraz had shown me yesterday. Sejil-2 ballistic missiles. Had to be.

But instead of speculating, I clicked a second audio link. In this one, the professor’s voice was more clipped, more urgent. “These are casings for Sejil-2 ballistic missiles.” Bingo. “Twenty-one such missiles were delivered this month to the underground facility in Natanz.”

I shook my head, though it wasn’t surprise I was feeling. “Ahmadinejad is fielding a strike force, Charlie.”

“You need to get in there,” he said. His cell phone rang. He came to his feet and put the phone to his ear. He spoke Farsi to whoever the caller was, and I sensed some annoyance in his voice. When he was done, he snapped the phone closed like a man who had spent too much time away from his business. He said, “I’ve got a problem with a shipment of Toyota car parts.”

He turned on his heels and left me alone in the room. Good. I needed the privacy. I checked my iPhone. There was a call tag from General Rutledge marked “urgent alert.” I guess pretty much everything was going to be urgent from here on out. I activated a secure video uplink. The general wore his gray camouflage uniform, and I could heard engines rumbling in the background.

He jumped right into the call. “Excellent intel. I won’t ask how you got it.”

“Your guys see it the way I did?”

“Roger that.” In other words, proof positive that Ahmadinejad was manufacturing enriched uranium at a rate that far exceeded his domestic, commercial needs. “The son of a bitch finally did it. He’s got nukes. We’re going public with it.”

He didn’t mean “public” in the conventional sense. He meant that the information would be going to fellow intelligence groups in Israel, England, France, and probably a half-dozen other nations.

“There’s more,” I said. I told him about the deuterium, the enriched uranium, and a battery of twenty-one missiles that apparently had arrived in Natanz over the last month.

Rutledge squinted. I sensed his mind wrestling with the implications.

“Okay,” he said. I heard the profundity in that one word and calculated the intensity in his gesture. Conclusion? He was about to hit me with another round of fun and games. Just what I needed. “The Iranians need more than enriched uranium to make viable weapons worth mounting on a Sejil-2 missile. You know that. They have yet to build a working bomb because they’re not going to waste the time or money making a weapon they can’t deploy.”

This was all open-source information. You could hear it on FOX News. I waited for the twist. Tom said, “One bottleneck in fielding a credible strike force is collecting enough precision electronics needed to arm and fuse the ballistic nuclear warheads.”

“I’m with you,” I said, meaning, Get to it, my friend. The clock’s ticking.

The general reached off the screen to touch an unseen button. “Which brings me to him. Take a look.”

A jumble of colored pixels replaced Tom’s image. The pixel resolution coalesced and sharpened into a photograph of a man standing next to an airline ticket counter. I recognized Atash Morshed, the online banker from Amsterdam responsible for laundering Iranian drug money and funneling it back into their weapons program.

“The photo you’re looking at was taken at the Beijing airport six days ago. It took that long for the computers to put two and two together.”

“That’s why I’m so fond of computers,” I said with razor-sharp sarcasm.

“Then you’ll appreciate this,” Tom said. “See his briefcase? Our agents in China have hard and fast evidence that our Amsterdam friend was in town, shopping product.”

He didn’t need to say that Morshed was shopping for special microelectronic circuit boards. The very type needed for finalizing the nukes. It was obvious.

“Our friend’s face wasn’t a priority fit until we finally got it on a fast track. Our guys in China made the connection the same day.”

“Good work.” I meant it.

“Our online banker has made a fortune laundering money and smuggling drugs using Iran as a conduit. At some point you have to pay the piper.”

“So it doesn’t take much to speculate that Ahmadinejad finally called in his marker and sent our friend on an errand to buy the components.”

Tom nodded. “We need verification.”

“You think he’s in Iran,” I said. I meant Morshed.

“The timing fits. And if he’s in Iran with circuit boards meant for those Sejil-2s…”

“Then Natanz is probably on his itinerary,” I said. “High stakes.”

“The highest.”

“It wouldn’t hurt for me to have a picture of those circuit boards. Can you make that happen?”

“I’ll send a close-up with the model number.”

I stared at his face. “There’s something else. What is it?”

“Our friend in Virginia isn’t happy. You’ve cut him out.”

“I’m not going there. He’s compromised. Or someone on his team is.” My voice could not have been calmer. “I’m more concerned about our friend on Pennsylvania Avenue.” I was talking about Landon Fry, the president’s chief of staff. “He jump ship yet?”

“He and I are having a face-to-face later today. A full update.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

I hung up. “Politicians.” The word came out more like a hiss. And why not. Snakes, every one of them.

I had no sooner disconnected the call with General Rutledge than my iPhone flashed two message prompts. The first was from Tom and contained a stock photo of the Chinese circuit board in question, listed as model number 378-98NB574. The Chinese didn’t mess around. The 378 was a ten-layer board so thin and light that you would expect it to crumple in a stiff breeze. They were protected with some sort of laminate material that I didn’t recognize and resistant to temperatures up to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The boards were ten-by-six, which meant Atash Morshed would need a small suitcase or a decent-size briefcase to transport them. This struck me as important. It meant that the product could travel from Beijing to Natanz and never leave his sight.

But maintaining anonymity in Natanz was not as easy as it might have been in a larger city. Natanz, for all its notoriety, wasn’t much more than a collection of settlements a half hour southeast of Kashan, and an hour northwest of Esfahan. It lay at the junction off Highway 7, and no more than forty thousand people called the place home. The Karkas Mountains formed a rugged, ten-thousand-foot background to the town and its collection of shrines and ruins. Besides the nuclear facility tucked in the mountains south of town, the one thing the people of Natanz liked to brag about was the inauspicious fact that Darius III was murdered there. I couldn’t find a historian who agreed with them, but why put a damper on their one claim to fame.

I heard a brief knock on the door, and Charlie peeked his head in. He had what looked like a diplomatic pouch in his hand.

“A courier from MEK chief Yousef Bagheri just dropped this off,” he said, placing the unopened pouch in my hand. “It looks like Professor Fouraz came through for us.”

I realized I was holding my breath as I broke the seal on the pouch, which suggested a reliance on an outside source that made me very uncomfortable. There were three pieces of documentation inside. The first was a single sheet of typing paper with six numbers laid out in a series of three written on it: 43-6-120. A short note read: Natanz entry code.

The next thing the pouch revealed was an employee ID badge for the Natanz nuclear facility in the name of Avan Javaherian, complete with a magnetic strip and a photo: mine. Just as long as no one asked me to pronounce Avan Javaherian …

Charlie was right. The professor had come through. I let my breath out. At least this time I wouldn’t be stowing away in the back of a semi loaded with concrete pipes and hoping the guards were too lazy to search them.

The last thing in the pouch was a delivery manifest for roofing tiles. I showed it to Charlie. “Leave it to me,” he said, just as my phone rang. “I’ll give you some privacy.”

“Five minutes,” I said. When the door closed, I picked up. It was Mr. Elliot.

“Your cover’s all set,” he said. His call was twelve minutes late, which was an eternity for my longtime case officer. I thought of chiding him, but detected a minor strain in his voice that convinced me otherwise. “I’ve arranged for you to join a group of Canadian archaeologists on their way to visit the Natanz ruins. But you’ve got to bus it. Their bus will be in Kashan in forty-five minutes. They’ve got a short stop at the Āghā Bozorg Mosque. That’s where you get onboard.”

“Nice,” I said.

“What’s not so nice is that, unlike Qom, security in Natanz is obvious and omnipresent, my friend. Cloak and dagger will only get you so far.”

I told him about the security code and the employee ID, and a minute bit of tension drained from his voice. He said, “Okay. Good progress so far. Push, but don’t press, right?”

I smiled. I hadn’t heard that one in years. “Good advice,” I told him.

By the time I signed off, both Charlie and Jeri were back in the room. Jeri updated me on the lures she and our counterintelligence team were laying for the twenty-six remaining candidates for traitor-of-the-year honors. “We’re using physical rendezvous points tomorrow night that we’ll be monitoring, all in central Tehran. I’m using every spare man we have.”

“We’ll have him within two days,” I said confidently. Then I told them my plans for entering Natanz posing as a French archaeologist.

“I like it,” Charlie said.

“But that doesn’t account for my delivery into the Natanz facility, and it doesn’t account for my other suitcase, Charlie.”

“Jeri’s taken care of that,” he said, glancing her way.

Jeri used the computer to pull up a street map of Natanz and the access roads leading to the nuclear facility. She pointed to a warehouse district north of town and traced a route to a railroad siding. “Here. Look for a white pickup truck. A Daihatsu. Your luggage is already onboard.”

She forwarded the map to my cell phone and said, “Now if you just looked a little more French and a little more like an archaeologist.”

“And you’re traveling too light. Looks suspicious,” Charlie said. He went to the closet and came back with a rolling carry-on. He stood the carry-on in front of me. “It’s got some extra clothes of mine and some toiletries. Nothing you can’t pitch if necessary.”

“And there’s one thing missing,” I said.

“Like what?”

“If I know my Canadian counterparts as well as I think I do, I imagine they might get thirsty on the long road to Natanz. Helping them out might be the neighborly thing to do, don’t you think?”

Jeri grinned; she had an amazing smile. Charlie waltzed over to the room’s liquor cabinet—an impressive collection of imported spirits that reminded me that Charlie had his hands in every possible form of contraband—and returned with a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon.

“Perfect.” I packed the bottle in the carry-on and zipped it closed.

“One more thing,” he said, nodding to Jeri. “Show him.”

Jeri reached into her jacket pocket and withdrew a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife in a thin leather sheath. “A little added firepower,” she said.

“Apparently,” Charlie said, “an MI6 agent used this to settle a gambling debt. Said it once belonged to a British commando from World War Two. As the story goes, it drew plenty of Nazi blood over the course of the war. Sounds like a lot of value-added bullshit to me.”

I inspected the blade. It was sturdy, razor sharp, and perfectly designed for close-quarters combat. I fastened the knife and sheath around the inside of my left ankle, tucked it inside my sock, and hid it beneath the pant cuff. “Let’s hope I don’t need it.”

Charlie drove me to the Āghā Bozorg Mosque. I presented my Canadian passport to the archaeological group’s minder, a woman from the Ministry of Tourism and certainly a part-timer with National Security. The head of the group was a balding, stooped man who introduced himself as Dr. Jeffrey Carlyle from the University of Manitoba. He was clearly suspicious of the latecomer to his entourage and asked too many questions too quickly.

“Thanks for having me onboard,” was pretty much all I said as the minder herded all twenty-three of us—college professors, students, and a couple of amateurs—onto a very comfortable tourist bus.

I sat near the back. Dr. Carlyle took a seat across the aisle, where his game of stink eye continued. I didn’t mind. I was more interested in the mounting evidence identifying the doctor as a day drinker: red nose, ravaged skin, spiderweb eyes.

Halfway to Natanz, I retrieved my carry-on from the overhead rack and unzipped the bag; I made sure our minder wasn’t looking. The bottle of Knob Creek bourbon lay swaddled in T-shirts, and I made sure Carlyle got a glimpse of it.

“If you should get a little thirsty.” I gave him a nod. Not too subtle.

The doctor’s gaze warmed. I guess he was easily impressed. He cleared his throat and whispered, “Splendid. Just the thing to cut the dust.”

Suddenly I was Dr. Carlyle’s best friend, and we chatted Iranian history until our bus pulled into a roundabout out front of a modest, three-story hotel situated near the edge of town and just off the main road.

We checked in and were issued old-fashioned brass keys to a string of rooms on the second floor. Just before dinner, there was a rough knock on my door. It was Dr. Carlyle, all decked out in a tweed suit that fit his ruddy complex to a tee. He had a glass bottle in his hand that had once contained premade green tea and the brilliant idea of using the bottle to transport Knob Creek whiskey to dinner. I acted like a man who would never have conceived such a clever idea, and together we congregated with the rest of our group in the hotel’s cramped, but tasteful restaurant.

“The only decent place for dinner in all Natanz,” our minder told us, as if the town was a disgrace to Iranian cuisine.

There were eight or ten other tables in the restaurant, all occupied, and all by foreigners from places far and wide: Russia, Germany, Japan, Sweden, France. As it turned out, Dr. Carlyle was not the only one who had arrived at dinner with a glass tea bottle in hand, and he was not the only one freshening drinks with the bottles’ mysterious potions. After an hour, I understood why. The food was terrible. Some Knob Creek made it almost edible.

Dessert was being served when I saw him. He was passing through the lobby, a tall, rounded man with a trimmed beard and thick eyebrows. Atash Morshed, the online banker from Amsterdam. I nearly dropped my drink. Impossible. I took in details as fast as my mind would record them. Expensive suit and fancy shirt, but no tie, an omission that gave him an unkempt look. His eyes moved too quickly for a tourist. He looked too exhausted for a successful businessman.

He carried a large briefcase. The briefcase was identical to the one in the photo from the airport in Beijing. The briefcase was chained to his wrist. He stopped at the front desk and made a telephone call. His gaze skimmed the room and reached into the restaurant, hopscotching from person to person in suspicion. He exuded nervous tension like a rank smell, at least for someone with my experience. And my experience was giving very good odds that the Chinese circuit boards were in the briefcase.

Morshed said a few words into the phone, listened, and hung up. He checked his watch in a gesture that was equal parts impatience, discomfort, and distress.

I flexed my leg and felt the hilt of the F-S knife press against the inside of my calf.

The banker had two new items for his busy schedule.

One, he was going to lose that briefcase.

And two, he was going to die.