Zana leaned against the thick windows that overlooked the lab, watching the busy floor. His face was reflected in the dark sheen of the lead-infused coating. Staring past it, he observed teams of techs working below as he sipped black coffee from a foam cup.
They wore either blue or yellow surgical-style suits, puffed up with radiation-resistant materials. The bulky, brightly colored unisex outfits gave them a benign, cartoonish quality. They trundled awkwardly through the bulging rows of equipment in their heavy uniforms, occasionally disappearing into one of the protected warrens to either side of the raised white floor, like so many Smurfs at work.
Standing there at ten in the morning, drinking his coffee, the former quantum physics professor was counting the heads of the blue smocks, the Iranians. For every ten of the blues, he noted, there was at least one yellow, a Russian. One of those yellows, he thought, was going to be a problem.
From this angle, Zana couldn’t quite tell which of the yellows on the floor might be the Russian disguised in protective gear who troubled him. But he knew the man was down there somewhere asking questions. He had that old Soviet way about him: brusquely impersonal until loaded up with vodka after hours, oafish but perceptive, smarter than he looked. Zana had never liked Russians much.
He crumpled the cup and dropped it in a trash bin, then settled at his desk. He fired up his e-mail, scrolling immediately to the message that had been on his mind all morning. It was simple, only one line, but he’d reread it over and over.
Not much to go on, really. The commander of the facility wanted to see him in his office tomorrow morning at 0700. The message from the commander’s adjutant said to leave a deputy in charge of the lab, as the meeting might go long. Full stop.
Zana had parsed each of the fifteen words that formed the e-mail at least a dozen times.
He was 80 percent sure it would be about the exit travel stamp for himself and Nadia. It had been two weeks since his request, and thus far, he’d heard nothing. His immediate superior, Javad, a thirty-five-year-old nuclear scientist with a streak of Islamic fervor, had told him that due to the extraordinary circumstances of the Russian visits, he wouldn’t be able to grant the stamps.
Though Zana was still in the traditional forty-day mourning period, Javad had said to put the exit travel stamp out of his mind, get back to work, take advantage of the Russian expertise.
That was Javad in a nutshell—a zealot, a revolutionary, a pasdar. People like him were why Zana had been sabotaging the entire operation. Javad believed they were on a mission from God. He believed a nuclear weapon would bring about the Mahdi, the messiah, the Twelfth Imam hiding in the Occultation since the year 872. He’d launch it the day he could.
Outsiders, Westerners, wouldn’t take these purported beliefs seriously. But the reality was, Javad and the other Twelvers who ran the IRGC really did believe they were akin to apostles, specially appointed ambassadors, the only ones in the current world who could cleanse it and return the world to God’s embrace. With the mysterious powers of the universe emanating now from their labs, why wouldn’t they? A former president, Ahmadinejad, had spent half a billion dollars building a palace for the Twelfth Imam’s return, to be installed after the first mushroom cloud. They weren’t kidding.
As apostles, they wanted to destroy the roots of decadence and resistance—America, Europe, Israel—in order to restore the divine world order. In their twisted logic, the fastest, most efficient way to do that was a nuke. And right now they were desperate for it. All these tensions with America . . . they saw it as the end of days.
But only the insiders, like Zana, knew just how serious they were. He thought it all nuts, an organized, terrified madness, a group suicide cult. He kept thinking he would wake up one day to find that they weren’t on a race toward the end of the world, with himself as the enabler in chief.
Iran deserved better. Iran, Persia, the empire that had first established international commerce and postal communications under Cyrus the Great. That was the real Iran. And it was under siege by all these Javads. They should have been driving toward modernity, not going the other direction. Instead, they would become death, destroyer of worlds, to borrow Oppenheimer’s famous line, lifted from the Bhagavad Gita.
Maybe there was still some sanity somewhere, Zana thought, leaning back, chilled. Not all were pure Twelvers like Javad. Some were more moderate, more pragmatic. They still believed in the vision of the clerics, but saw the path as more evolutionary, less doomsday. They saw Iran to be an ascendant world power, rebuilding the world in God’s vision without immediately destroying it to bring that vision about.
Thinking of that e-mail again, he’d always considered the commander to be of that stripe: committed to the IRGC, committed to nuclear weapons development for Iran, but not quite prepared to immolate millions. The commander at least had a speck of humanity buried in his DNA. It hadn’t yet been hijacked by the fervent, overwrought interpretations of ancient texts—had it?
And so it was to the commander Zana had appealed for the travel stamps, going right over Javad’s head. That was two weeks ago. Since then, nothing. Now the commander wanted to see him in person.
He moved the cursor up and down the message, thinking about it. Yes, that must be it—the exit visa. Why else?
The commander was a busy man, constantly working with dignitaries, plainclothes MOIS intelligence men, clerics, Russians, Chinese. In fact, he’d just been in Tehran for the last few days and was supposed to return tonight. It was strange that his first order of business would be an early-morning meeting with Zana. Troubling.
There was a distant noise in the lab beneath his feet. Zana could hear hatches closing, the warning bells of the equipment, a few shouts among techs over the rising hum of machines. He could feel a faint vibration through his rubber-soled shoes. Another test was starting up, the fourth that morning.
He checked more e-mails. Several from Javad asking him to prepare reports for the Russians. He reread the one from Nikita, his new Russian “helper” down there on the floor right now, running around in his yellow suit, probably the one demanding this fourth test.
In his gruff style, the Russian had said he wanted to spend a few hours with Zana that afternoon to learn about the SCADA design. Nikita said he considered himself an expert in Zippe centrifuges, but acknowledged that he was less familiar with this particular one, built by a French–German consortium but of the classic Swiss type.
Yes, Zana thought, thinking about that request. The array was nothing if not unique. It had been built in another research facility in Arak, three hundred miles away, at a civilian research site. It was then disassembled and transported secretly here to Tabriz to be rebuilt deep belowground in this hardened bunker in order to create highly enriched uranium (HEU) with at least a 90 percent concentration of U235—weapons grade.
But the unique enrichment environment had never made it to weapons grade. The purity had never made it above 50 percent and, even then, not in sufficient quantities for the critical mass of a weapon. And now the commander wanted to see him. It could go long. . . . Leave the deputy in charge. Not good.
Zana lit a cigarette and slouched in his chair, thinking about how he would approach the discussion with the Russian. He inhaled smoke and kept it in his lungs, staring but not seeing, his eyes drifting toward the window on the far side of the office. He blew the smoke out, feeling the nicotine. Should he take the Russian’s word at face value? Was it true he didn’t know much about the Franco–German array? Or was he trying to draw Zana out? Why the insistence on meeting today? Why the day before the appointment with his commander?
He thought of Nadia at home in Tehran, more than three hundred miles to the southeast, waiting to hear from him. He hadn’t been in touch with her for a week. The last time they’d spoken of his plans, in the bathroom next to running water, he’d directed her to be ready to leave on a moment’s notice. Perhaps, he thought, he should give her a call now to check in, to make sure she’d followed through, communicating it in their own special code. Perhaps, he thought darkly, it would be the last time he’d ever be able to speak with her. He blew a jet of smoke through his nose, stubbed out the cigarette.
He stood, stretched, walked to his door. He looked down the hall and saw the normal pair of Guardsmen standing there, leaning against a wall, talking to each other. One of them noticed him and waved. The scientist waved back and headed to the men’s room down the hall, empty. His entire team was down on the floor with the Russians. He was alone. Good.
He hurriedly washed and dried his hands and returned to his office, waving again at the Guardsmen. He shut the office door behind him and carefully, quietly, pressed the button on the knob. The locking click seemed too loud and he waited a moment before backing away.
Sitting down at his computer, he accessed the web, moving the mouse quickly. It was actually a “walled garden” of the real Internet, hemmed in by the Guards’ firewall to limit access. But that wasn’t a problem for Zana, not today. He navigated to the site of the lab’s equipment supplier, a company called Baramar, Dubai-based.
Baramar did business with the Iranians through another ex-im company, an IRGC front. But Baramar itself was a legit systems integrator and reseller of industrial equipment, including the Franco–German array that was humming away now just twenty yards below Zana’s office.
He logged in to the site and landed on a technical support page. Since he knew his web traffic would be tracked, he went to an archival page that maintained technical manuals for the lab equipment. He began downloading one, thinking he’d use it to keep Nikita busy by giving it to him as a preread before their discussion. He’d bury the fat Slav with data.
As the file was downloading, Zana opened another tab and accessed another Baramar site. He went through a series of URLs in a complicated sequence. He eventually found his way to an obscure page dense with nonsensical terms and conditions for the warranty of an industrial cooling fan. He scrolled down the page to find a particular sentence and a particular eight-point-font word: “indemnification.”
This word was a regular HTML link, though one would never know it, since it looked just like the rest of the text. He clicked on it. Another window opened up with another log-in screen. He authenticated again, this time with different credentials known only to him.
Once on this page, he looked at a simple plaintext message board, not unlike the ones from the early days of the Internet. There were about fifteen messages stacked up, all of them from the Americans. They went back about six weeks, to when he’d stopped communicating with them, telling them that he would only work with his original handler from now on—or else.
The nature of each message was a query, each building in urgency as he read down the stack. They were asking him why he hadn’t checked in as scheduled. They were asking him where he was. They were asking him if he was safe. Their intensity grew until they were virtually pleading with him.
But on the final, fifteenth line of the in-box there was an altogether different message from only a day ago. The subject line simply read, Hi—This Is Reza. There were no other words in the body of the message itself, only an attached file, encrypted.
Zana’s hands recoiled, then hovered over the keyboard. He felt his pulse in his ears. Reza. Finally.
The centrifuge test was in full swing now: the red lights strobing, the bells ringing, the Smurfs hiding. Zana ignored the noise. He went back to the office door and pressed his cheek against the cold metal, listening for footsteps that might be headed his way. The Guards’ boots tended to make an audible click on the hall’s polished linoleum. If anyone was coming, he’d be able to hear it.
Besides, he wasn’t too worried about the Guards. When the bells were ringing, the Guards tended to stand back, as though an extra twenty feet of air would protect them from a radioactive disaster. He was more concerned about Nikita.
He was worried the Russian might have decided to come up and monitor the test here in the office. It would take him about five minutes to free himself from his yellow protective suit and make his way upstairs. Zana guessed that more than five minutes had elapsed since the test had begun. But with his ear pressed to the door, he heard nothing unusual.
He turned around, pressed his back hard against the door, pushing against it. While braced, he hurriedly tugged the lining of the right front pocket of his twill trousers, letting it flop on his thigh. He fingered the inseam of the exposed white cotton and found a small flap secured by Velcro. He opened the cavity and retrieved a tiny black MMC memory card, the approximate size of a postage stamp.
He approached his PC and, with the delicate card between finger and thumb, loaded it into the appropriate slot. He kept one eye on the door as he navigated to the message from Reza and right-clicked it. He started to download the small encrypted file onto the MMC card.
Though small, the download was queued up because the PC was still digesting the technical manual. He was faced with the ubiquitous Windows hourglass. Come on, he thought, cursing the slow network. The test in the lab was over. The red light had stopped. Zana tapped his foot and leaned over the keyboard, willing it to hurry the hell up.
The tech manual was done downloading. The PC had just started on the encrypted file now. In the absence of the lab test below, his office fell quiet. Then he heard a pounding noise.
Someone was knocking on his door with an open palm. Javad.
The encrypted file finished downloading. Zana removed the card and shoved it in his pocket, hurrying to the door.
“Come on,” Javad said, bursting into the room, looking around, nostrils flaring. He’d been running. “Hurry. The commander wants to see us now. He got back from Tehran early.”