41
Hamadan, Iran
David thanked Birjandi and his study group of young clerics.
He said good-bye, then hit the road for Qom. From Hamadan, it was a 283-kilometer journey. He estimated it would take about two and a half hours. As soon as he was under way, he put on his Bluetooth headset, pulled out his phone, and speed-dialed Eva on the secure channel.
“Hey, it’s me, checking in,” he began.
She seemed glad to hear his voice and asked him how he was feeling. It felt good to talk to a friend, and he confided he was still battling physical discomfort and flashes of panic, both from the waterboarding and from the car crash in Tehran the week before. But soon he shifted quickly to the real reason for his call. “Have you mailed the phones yet? Please say no.”
“Why?”
“I need them rerouted.”
“Well, you’re in luck,” Eva said. “The phones actually just arrived from technical, all one hundred, most of them damaged, just as you requested.”
“Do they really look like they were beat up in shipping? It has to be believable.”
“Don’t worry,” she assured him. “These guys are pros.”
“Good. Look, don’t send them to my address in Tehran.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not going to be there tomorrow. Change in plans. I’m heading to Qom right now. Can you overnight them there?”
“Of course. Where to?”
He gave her the address for the Qom International Hotel on Helal Ahmar Street.
“Done,” she said.
“Thanks. Any luck hunting down Najjar?”
“None. It’s a nightmare. He’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
“How in the world did he escape?”
“Please don’t go there.”
“I’m just asking.”
“I don’t know how it happened, all right? I wasn’t there. I was coming back from New York at the time, but I can’t tell you how many people who outrank you I’ve had that conversation with.”
“I’m not blaming you,” David said.
“You’d be the first.”
“I was just asking—really.”
“How about you? Any leads on the nuclear scientists, the location of the bombs, on any of your objectives?”
He could see he’d made a mistake asking about Najjar’s escape. “Okay. Let’s change the topic. What did you think about Egypt joining the Caliphate today?”
“I’d expected Riad and Yassin to hem and haw and tell the Mahdi they needed to think about it and they’d get back to him,” she answered.
“Like Farooq?”
“Exactly.”
“I thought the same. How can we expect to build a Sunni alliance against the Caliphate with Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, and hopefully some others, if Egypt fell so quickly?”
“The director is furious. So is the king. They met in Amman today.”
“Did it go well?”
“Not after the news out of Cairo.”
“What happened in the meeting?”
“Which one?”
“The one between Riad, Yassin, and the Mahdi.”
“I’ve got nothing on it yet.”
“Let me know when you hear something,” David said. “Fareed Riad didn’t bide his time as vice president and carry Abdel Ramzy’s water all these years to gain the reins of Egypt one day and then hand them over to the Twelfth Imam the next. Something doesn’t add up.”
“You’re right,” Eva said. “And it was odd, too, because Riad wasn’t standing with the Mahdi in Tahrir Square when he gave his big speech. The field marshal was there and some of the other generals, but not Riad.”
David needed to get off the phone, but Eva asked him one more question. “Any news on your mom?”
There was a long silence. “No,” David said quietly. “Not yet.”
“Keep us posted, okay?”
“I will. Thanks for asking.”
“Sure. See you soon.”
“Okay. Oh—one more thing. Are you still there?”
“Yes,” Eva said. “I’m here.”
“Could you send some fresh flowers to my mom’s room from me?”
“Sure, anything you need.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” David signed off and hung up the phone. He glanced at the clock on the dashboard of his rented Peugeot. It was getting late. There was almost no traffic on Route 37 as he headed north for the junction with Route 48, which would take him most of the way to Qom. He yawned and rubbed his eyes and scolded himself for not asking Birjandi for some coffee to take on the road.
He was grateful for Eva’s friendship and for how good she was at her job. She was an incredible researcher and an even better interrogator. Her Farsi was flawless, her judgment was solid, and she always bent over backward to help him do his job better. She was a first-rate intelligence operative, which was why her questions to him had stung. She was right—he didn’t have any leads on Khan or Zandi or the other six warheads, and he was running out of time and options.
* * *
Natanz, Iran
Jalal Zandi sent an urgent page to Tariq Khan.
Less than a minute later, he felt his own pager vibrate, checked the incoming numeric code, and immediately excused himself and logged on to the Iranian singles chat room that he and Khan often used to send classified messages to one another outside normal communications channels.
Zandi asked under the user name Mohammed.
Khan replied under the user name Jasmine.
* * *
Highway 37, En Route to Qom
David pulled up Abdol Esfahani’s personal mobile number.
But he hesitated before dialing. It was so late. Yet he had to be up. The man was quickly moving up in the Twelfth Imam’s circle of allies, and he would want to know the phones were on the way. Maybe he’d have a tidbit of intel David could squeeze out of him, something—anything—to point him in the right direction. He finally hit Send but got no answer and had to leave a message.
Next, he called Esfahani’s secretary, Mina, at home. She wouldn’t be happy with a late-night call, but she’d always been helpful. She was single. She lived alone. So he wouldn’t be getting a husband or a father. He’d tell her the truth, that he was trying to find her boss to talk about the delivery of the satellite phones, but maybe he could elicit some valuable information from her as well. After seven rings, however, he got voice mail, so he left a message and asked her to return his call as soon as possible.
As he continued driving north in the darkness, he began to have second thoughts. Even when they called back, what were they really likely to know? And if they did know something useful, why would they tell him? His doubts were rising rapidly and with them a growing sense of anxiety that all this effort wasn’t going to work, that he wasn’t going to be able to find these scientists or these warheads or stop this war in time, yet he might actually get killed trying. The waterboarding had shaken him more than he was willing to concede to Zalinsky or Eva. He had always told himself he was ready to die for his country, but now he was not so sure. He was giving this job, this mission, all he had, but what if it wasn’t enough? How far was he willing to go, how much was he willing to put on the line, if in the end all the effort achieved little or nothing at all? What would be the point of making the ultimate sacrifice if he didn’t make a lasting difference?
That said, was he really going to give up now? How could he? He was deep inside enemy territory. He had given his word. He was fully committed. And he reminded himself that he ultimately wasn’t doing any of this for Zalinsky or Murray or Allen or the president. He was doing it for Marseille, for his parents, to protect them if possible but also to honor them in a way he had a hard time explaining. He hoped someday they would understand.
David passed through the town of Veyan and soon approached the junction for Route 48. There still wasn’t much civilian traffic, but he was struck by the number of military vehicles now on the road: troop transports, jeeps, and even tanks being transferred from one place to another on flatbed trucks. He wondered whether this was some sort of anomaly in this area or whether Jack and Eva and Tom were getting reports of more military movement around the country. He made a mental note to report what he was seeing on his next call to Langley, for he suspected it was probably widespread. Iran was getting ready for a war that could commence within days. It certainly made sense that they were making final preparations.
Suddenly he found himself thinking of a line on intelligence gathering from Sun Tzu’s classic tome, The Art of War: “Foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from men who know the enemy situation.” Wasn’t this why Zalinsky had sent him inside Iran on this particular mission in the first place? The satellite phones were supposed to be giving them the ability to eavesdrop on the very men who knew the enemy’s situation, who were planning and executing that situation. They had certainly had some important successes so far. But why weren’t they getting more phone intercepts? Why weren’t they being deluged with more details and insights than they could keep up with?
David pondered that for some time. Most of the regime leadership’s conversations were probably via secure e-mail, a system they had not yet been able to tap into but which they would more likely be able to compromise once all of MDS’s advanced telecommunications software was installed nationwide, though that was still months away. But the prime reason had to be that the Iranians at the highest echelons of the regime did not trust the satellite phones yet. Given their previous experience of buying satphones from the Russians and later finding them all bugged by the FSB, that certainly made sense. And what had Esfahani just said? “We are about to live in a world without America and without Zionism. Our holy hatred is about to strike like a wave against the infidels. We don’t trust anyone. We can’t trust anyone. The enemy is moving. He is among us. We must be careful.”
Wasn’t that why they had tortured him? Wasn’t that why Javad had called Firouz and Jamshad using his satphone and spoken so openly about where to pick up their fake passports? They were testing, probing, trying to determine whether anyone was listening in, trying to determine whom and what they could trust.
Had the phones now passed the test? David guessed the answer was yes. That was why Esfahani was pushing him so hard to get the rest of the phones. He suspected, therefore, that call usage was about to soar. He certainly hoped so, but even that wasn’t going to be enough. Langley was relying far too heavily on SIGINT, signals intelligence, and more specifically on COMINT, communications intelligence. No one in the world was better at either than the US intelligence community, as David knew firsthand. But that wasn’t why Zalinsky had recruited him, to bolster the Agency’s already-strong hand. Zalinsky had specifically recruited him to help rebuild the Agency’s weakest link, HUMINT, human intelligence. For the $80 billion they spent a year on spying, the US was doing far too little of it. They weren’t putting nearly enough NOCs fluent in Farsi, Arabic, Urdu, and other Middle Eastern languages into the field to befriend or buy off men who knew the enemy situation. They had him, but David realized he had to aim higher. If he had any shot at truly being useful, he had to be talking to insiders, which led him to one name: Javad Nouri.
It was high risk, and he was not specifically authorized by Zalinsky to make contact with the Twelfth Imam’s right-hand man. But what choice did he have? Javad likely knew more about the enemy’s plans than any single individual, aside from the Mahdi himself. True, David had only met the guy once, when Esfahani had told him to collect the first satellite phones David had smuggled into the country. They had spoken only briefly. But David was desperate. So he pulled up Javad’s number—not the satphone number, but his mobile—and dialed.
“I’m not here right now, or I’m on the other line. Please leave me your name, number, and a brief message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
The recording didn’t give a name, but the voice was unmistakable.
“Javad, hey, this is Reza. Sorry to bother you, but I couldn’t get in touch with our mutual friends, so I thought I’d just call you directly. By tomorrow, I should have most of the gifts you guys requested. Still trying to get the rest but thought I should get you these right away. Please call me and let me know how best to get them to you. Thanks.”
David gave his own number and hung up. “Three strikes and you’re out,” he sighed as he passed another military convoy on the road to Qom.