In the privacy of an ascending elevator car, Kasem Kahlidi ran his hand along the underside of his chin. It itched. His beard had grown to a half inch, and while it was shorter than those of the rest of the pasdaran with whom he now traveled, he was beginning to look the part. But he hated the beard.
Occupational hazard, he told himself, noticing his face in the panel glass, adjusting the belt buckle of his green uniform. He shrugged off the thought.
The Quds man was accustomed to living a double life. He’d spent much of his career abroad equipping various Shia groups with the means to thrive. As an educated man who’d worn multiple skins, he’d eventually found the one that fit him best. It just so happened that it wasn’t this.
Far from it. He vastly preferred the fictitious life he’d fashioned for himself as the president of a large ex-im firm in Beirut. That freedom to live the legend was why he enjoyed being a Quds man, the most prestigious arm of the national security apparatus. In this young republic, he saw it as his way to the top.
Quds, or Jerusalem, Force was named for the Israeli city the pasdaran intended to liberate. Their vision was to restore her to the Shia realm alongside her sisters: Mecca, Medina, Najaf. Quds was the covert special forces arm of IRGC, built up by General Soleimani. Until he’d been killed in the American drone strike, the general had been on his way up, a future president.
Kasem had navigated his career to be near the great man, eventually becoming his top weapons procurer. Most of the time this meant buying arms on the black market for untraceable use by Hezbollah. Over time, it had grown to include multiple international operations—Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq.
As president of his fictitious company, he had a closetful of Armanis in each of his four apartments in Europe. At each he maintained a car, a driver, and a ready stable of girlfriends. This had been the life to which he’d become accustomed—a long way from the Spartan pasdar he pretended to be now.
The elevator doors opened. He stepped out and walked the ten yards to his apartment door. Here he paused and ran his hand along the top left of the jamb, feeling carefully with his fingertips. He’d placed a piece of transparent tape at the crease between the jamb and the door, a routine he followed wherever he was staying.
The seal was broken.
Genuinely surprised, he backed up, retreating to a corner. He dropped to a knee, steadying himself with a deep breath. He wondered—could the Russians be monitoring him? The Russian embassy with its large, expansive garden was only three-quarters of a mile from here. Could that fat little Yuri Kuznetsov have set up surveillance on him? That would have been brazen.
Kasem fished through his shoulder bag for his nine-millimeter Browning service pistol. He withdrew it from its holster and crept to the door.
In a crouch, he waited, listening, the pistol at his side. There were no unusual sounds in the hallway, just the clunk of the elevator operating somewhere behind him. He slowly advanced to the door and pressed his ear against it. Inside the apartment, he could hear the clank of dishes, the hiss of the tap.
Kasra.
Relieved, he jammed his pistol in the rear of his waistband.
Opening the door, he was enveloped by the pleasant smell of roasting lamb. He looked across the white marble floor toward the kitchen and the bright view of the snowy Zagros, jagged against a pink sky. Kasra hadn’t yet heard him.
He paused to admire her silhouette. She was the same age as him, no longer youthful. But more alluring now than the twentysomething girl he’d once known.
She caught him in the reflection and turned. “You’re earlier than I thought you’d be.” She turned, smiled, spread her arms, indicating the mess in the kitchen. “Surprise!”
He wore a black beret on his head with a lieutenant colonel’s insignia. He liked it canted to the left in the style of the French. He smiled through his beard. “How’d you get in?”
“I think your doorman is sweet on me. When I showed up with a bag of groceries, he took pity.”
He nodded. “How could he not be sweet on you?” He took note that the doorman might be a problem. But putting it aside, he said, “Let me get out of this uniform.”
He walked sideways to his bedroom, careful to face front so she wouldn’t see the pistol.
Reemerging a few minutes later in an open, untucked shirt over blue jeans, he snuck up behind her, embracing her as she worked.
“I’m not sure I can get used to the feeling of that beard on my neck,” she said. She raised an arm behind her, pulling his head in close.
“Come now,” he said. “I think you’ve found it acceptable when applied to other parts of your body.”
She wriggled out of the grasp. “You’re the worst.” She poured a glass of cabernet. “By the way, I don’t know where on earth you managed to get all of this wonderful stuff. But keep it up.”
“France,” he said, examining the label. “Just don’t ask how I get it here.”
He poured a glass for himself. Mushrooms and vegetables were frying on the range. He leaned over the pan.
“May I add a bit to this?”
She nodded. He poured wine into the mushrooms.
“In France they use it in everything. I love it.”
After dinner, they sat on his sofa finishing the bottle, bare feet touching. She was telling him about her day. She was a nurse with the gynecology practice at the nearby Akhtar Hospital, only a few blocks from his apartment.
She paused, pointed to the rising moon. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s look at it on the balcony.” She pulled him to his feet.
This apartment in Tehran’s first district, Elahieh, was a luxury, out of character for a pasdar. But worth it. They’d grown up together in the leafy Nakhvajan District, just to the northeast, in relative wealth. Her father had been a chemist with an oil company. His, an electrical engineer.
Her parents had emigrated to Germany when she was still studying medicine. By then she’d fallen in love, a contemporary who went on to complete his residency in a London hospital, a common destination for Iranian medical professionals. But Kasra had stayed behind, picking up work in the hospitals of Tehran, specializing in obstetrics, which she saw as sorely lacking in her home country. She’d carved out a life for herself, assuming her man would one day return. He never did.
After admiring the balcony view, they retreated to the sofa, a second bottle of red. She was fully at home now, going on about work, lazily intertwining legs as they reclined. When she’d finished discussing a girl who’d been recovering from a broken arm, she looked at him. “Your turn.”
“For what?”
“To tell me about your day. That’s how this is supposed to work.”
He shifted on his hip. “I’m but a humble soldier in the Imam’s service.”
“Humble. You.” She laughed. “Tell me, please, about the Guardsman that lives in a District One penthouse, sipping wine with a nonbeliever like me.”
He shrugged.
“Seriously, Kasem,” she said, her eyes hardening. “You must be able to share something. I’m not an enemy of the state.”
He angled his head at her. “If you’re trying to out me, you’re making a big mistake.” He smiled, deflecting.
She touched the scar that protruded from his collarbone to his sternum. “You can change what you wear, but you can’t change who you are.”
She pressed on the raised pink skin. “This is about four millimeters from your jugular. You know that, right?” It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to get him to talk about it. She was looking at him intensely. He found it unnerving.
He felt the need to say something about it, for once. Touching his own finger to the wound, he said, “Bloody but unbowed, as the saying goes.”
“What saying?”
He switched to English. “The line from Invictus.”
She replied in accented English of her own. “Wine, poetry, mystery. You think you know a way to a girl’s heart. But I can see right through you. I know who you really are. Don’t forget that, Kasem jon.” She nudged him again, harder this time. “Tell me about that scar. I’m asking. Seriously.”
He put his glass on the coffee table and stood, gently pulling her up to meet him. Wrapping his arms around her, he kissed her, then spoke softly into her ear, reciting in English:
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
She pulled back from him and held his face in her hands.
“Incorruptible,” she said. She stood on her toes and kissed him on the collarbone, right on the scar. “One day you’ll tell me.”
The following morning he was back at MOIS HQ, center city, near the airport. The commute from First District was maddening, taking him more than an hour.
He leaned forward over a capacious desk, looking at a stack of forty personnel files that stood to one side. He sighed.
Unlike his work setting up shell corporations in European capitals, this was the kind of analytical slog he’d managed to avoid. He considered himself a man of action, of charisma, of urbanity, not some desk jockey who had to sort through data. This was MOIS work.
He’d thought it would be easy. Since he’d begun this mission of rooting out a suspected mole based on the tip from Kuznetsov, he’d thought he’d uncover it in a matter of days and emerge the hero. He’d already imagined the laurels for the discovery of the mole. He’d envisioned how the powerful stroke would put him at the top of Quds.
But so far, he’d turned up nothing. The scientific summit with the Russians in Bushehr was only a week or two away. If ever there was a critical time in which to have a breakthrough, this was it.
He’d had the records pulled for every military and civilian scientist associated with Zaqqum, Iran’s national nuclear project. Zaqqum spanned multiple facilities. There was the heavy water reactor at Arak, the partially completed Russian reactor at Bushehr, the former underground enrichment facility at Natanz, the reconstituted enrichment facility deep under Tabriz.
Throughout this entire national enterprise, there were thousands of workers involved, both civilian and military. Since Kuznetsov had referenced the leak, Kasem had reasoned that the most likely source would be where the Russians were now working. How else would they have detected one?
There were Russians working at Bushehr, Arak, and the secret facility at Tabriz, accounting for some three hundred technicians, all of whom were sequestered under guarded living conditions. As Colonel Maloof had said, all the workers associated with Zaqqum had been painstakingly vetted. It seemed airtight.
He placed his hand at the top of the stack of files. Needle meet haystack.
He spent the rest of the day looking over the backgrounds of the associated civilians. Much of the work was manual since the Iranian database files were woefully inadequate. Maloof had assigned three young MOIS officers to Kasem. He’d been having them chase down various details related to each of the civilians, following up with phone calls, verifying records. One by one they’d been clearing the technical workers, perhaps ten per day.
Toward five o’clock, as the shadows began to lengthen, he heard the azan. Brothers of the IRGC stopped what they were doing and knelt on their namaz rugs, facing Mecca.
Kasem joined them, clearing a spot by his desk. He knelt toward the holy city, west of Iran, and thought about the distance between himself and Saudi Arabia, across the Persian Gulf.
He thought about the crucial upcoming summit at Bushehr, a city on the Gulf.
He thought of Kuznetsov.
The azan chanted on; he remained prostrate, thinking. What if, he thought, he simply beat the daylights out of the SVR man, forcing him into a more forthcoming attitude? He’d been close to doing it the last time he’d seen him in Lebanon, but the Russian had wisely brought along reinforcements.
It might be different if Kasem could catch him by surprise. Through his association with Hezbollah, he had an extensive network of cutouts that could take care of the dirty work.
The azan ended. He stood and walked to the window.
He looked out at the MOIS compound, his mind elsewhere. An IRGC Mi-8 helicopter was lifting off from the heliport. A Russian-built helicopter screaming to gain altitude. The Russians had recently provided the IRGC with thirty of the helos, a goodwill gesture in order to buttress Iran’s fleet of aging American UH-1 Hueys. He started thinking about Kuznetsov again.
Yes. Hezbollah. That would do it.
He retrieved his cell phone and made a call.