The Increment (12 page)

Harry Pappas got the
news from Tehran in a back-channel message from Adrian Winkler. The cable was tentative, cautious, almost stinting. “We may have a useful lead in Tehran,” Winkler wrote. “Can you perhaps pay us another visit soon, so that we can make some plans?”
May, perhaps, some.
These were words for a diplomatic reception. Harry suspected that Winkler had delayed a day or two before sending the message so that he could think about what to do and make a few inquiries of his own. Harry couldn’t really be angry. He would have done the same thing.

Harry cabled back that he would be in London in forty-eight hours. Things were moving quickly in Washington. “Dr. Ali” had responded to the tasking message left in the “iranmetalworks” Gmail drop box. He didn’t have any information about an alternative plutonium program, or the heavy-water reactor. Those projects must be in a different compartment, if they existed at all. But he had provided the date of the test of the neutron generator, three months before. And he had specified the location, a research complex at Parchin, twenty miles southeast of Tehran.

The confirmation of the test site was enough for Arthur Fox and the planners in the Situation Room. Now they had coordinates to feed into the topographical mapping system for a cruise missile strike. Centcom was informed; the ships of the Fifth Fleet on patrol in the Persian Gulf added Parchin to their target set.

“Dr. Ali” had added a final note to his response. “Please be careful. The risk for your business now is very small, but for my business, it is very great.”

Harry tried to talk to Fox about what that might mean. “
The risk for your business now is very small
.” Was that part of his message? The Iranians were trying to make a bomb, but they weren’t doing very well at it. They were having technical difficulties. Perhaps the counter-proliferation analysts at the CPD and the policy planners on the NSC staff were missing the point. The Iranians weren’t on the verge of anything, except more failure.

Fox was dismissive of Harry’s speculation. “You’re looking for a way to avoid confrontation,” he said.

“What’s wrong with avoiding confrontation?”

Fox rolled his eyes, as if the aging case officer just didn’t get it, which made Harry angry. Usually he let conversations like this go; they were pointless. But not this time.

“Hey, Arthur, if you hadn’t noticed, we don’t have enough troops to fight the wars we’ve already got in that part of the world. But that’s not your department, is it? You start them; let other people finish up.”

Fox just snorted. He had the cards he needed. Harry could wring his hands all he liked, but it wouldn’t make any difference. Power flowed to the people who were prepared to be decisive, not to the worriers and nitpickers. Even Harry knew that he lacked the information to challenge Fox. He couldn’t be sure what “Dr. Ali” meant—and the real meaning of his information about the Iranian nuclear program—without knowing who he was. And on that front, so far as Fox could tell, Harry had made no progress whatsoever.

Harry went to see
the director and get his approval for another trip to London. It was an awkward meeting. The director remained a military man at heart. He had filled his seventh-floor office with navy bric-a-brac from his previous commands. Little models of subs and cruisers, awards and decorations, even his diploma from the Naval Academy. Perhaps he kept them around to ward off the bad vibes of the agency. Harry felt sorry for him, beached here at Langley like a four-star whale. As a military officer, the director appreciated an orderly chain of command. He didn’t like conflict among his subordinates. And as much as he valued the help of MI6, he wasn’t eager to share his most precious secrets with another intelligence service. But Harry wouldn’t let go.

“I think London has a positive ID on our man,” Harry explained. “We shouldn’t do anything big until we chase this down. Right now we’re making policy based on bits of intelligence, and we aren’t even sure what those bits mean or where they come from.”

The director nodded wearily. It wasn’t as if he didn’t understand the dangers. “What’s your alternative, Harry?” he asked. “The White House wants to move.”

“Find our source. Debrief him, outside the country if we can. Do the normal things. Polygraph him, train him, give him covert communications. This could be the agency’s best asset since Penkovsky. But first we have to find him. SIS has a lead. That gives us a chance.”

“But we don’t have time.”

“Of course we have time. Unless I’m missing something, Dr. Ali is telling us we have lots of time. His boys are messing up. That’s what these messages say, if you turn them upside down and shake them. We are rushing into this for no good reason. We should work this case, instead of acting on impulse.”

“Arthur Fox and his friends have another idea about what to do with your boy,” said the director.

“Great,” Harry muttered. “What is it?” Fox hadn’t told him about another plan, but then, he wouldn’t.

“Task him to look for more things we can make public, when we go to the United Nations.”

“When we attack Iran, you mean? Or announce an embargo? That’s crazy, based on what we have.”

The director shrugged. That was what Appleman and the president were talking about. They wanted to build enough of a case that they could get at least a fig leaf of international support if they decided to strike.

Harry had a sense of vertigo. He had been here before, sitting in this office with a previous CIA director who had wanted to play ball with the White House. People assumed that the United States had the goods when it made a presentation at the United Nations. Even after everything that had happened, that was still true. Young men and women pledged to risk their lives when their leaders said they had proof the nation was threatened.

We have to stop them now, Dad, before they get the big one.
His own son Alex had said that, before he deployed to Kuwait at the start of OIF. That was what Alex had always called it, the official name, “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Harry had known in his gut that it was a lie. He was playing along, like everyone else in NE Division, because they all understood that nothing could stop the march to war. But Harry knew it was bullshit. He would be an old man in a wheelchair before the Iraqis got close to building a nuclear weapon. He hadn’t said that to his son at the time. And he couldn’t say it now.

“Give me a little more time, Admiral,” said Harry. “I’ll be back from London by this weekend.” It wasn’t a request, but a statement. “Please don’t tell Arthur about the trip. And don’t let him send any more messages to Tehran until I get back. Please protect me. You’re all I’ve got.”

“As long as I can, Harry. But there is a clock ticking downtown. It’s going to take a lot of juice to turn the damn thing off. And don’t play any games with your British friends. They may speak the same language, but they don’t salute the same flag. Don’t forget that, or you’ll get in a kind of trouble I can’t help you with.”

Harry went into his
daughter’s room that night to say goodbye. He would be on the plane for London the next evening when she got home from school, and he had always made a habit of giving his children a farewell kiss before going anywhere on assignment. He was superstitious that way, never sure which trip might be the last one. He expected that his daughter would be clipped and sullen with him, the way she usually was these days, but tonight was different. Lulu’s face was illuminated in the glow of her laptop computer when he opened her door, listening to her music and visiting the Facebook sites of her friends, probably, but she closed the lid and put the computer aside when he came into the room.

“Hi, Daddy,” she said brightly.

“I have to go away for a few days,” said Harry. “I wanted to give you a goodbye kiss.”

She reached out her arms. She never asked where he was going. Neither did Andrea. That was part of the family bargain.

Harry kissed her cheek and held her, longer than he had intended. Her head felt small in his arms, the way it had when she was a baby.

“You seem sad, Daddy,” she said.

Harry pulled back. He hadn’t meant to seem like anything.

“I guess I am.” He paused. “I miss my family when I go away.” Something made him want to keep talking. “Sometimes I miss my family when I’m home, too. There’s never enough time. It’s hard to say the words.”

“We know how hard you work, Daddy. We know it’s important.”

“It’s not more important than you, Louise.”

She smiled up at him. It was almost a look of compassion, like what he used to see in Andrea’s face back when she didn’t turn away when their eyes met.

“Don’t be sad, Daddy,” said Lulu. “We love you.”

Harry got into London
very early on the United flight, and he had some time to kill before his meeting with Adrian. He took a taxi into the city, and walked along the Thames for an hour. London was just coming awake. The delivery trucks were out, but otherwise the streets were empty. He strolled down Victoria Embankment, just below Whitehall, and then crossed the Waterloo Bridge toward the railway station and Royal Festival Hall. Britain had still been in a post-imperial daze when these graceless concrete buildings were constructed. Maggie Thatcher was just getting started with her wrecking ball.

Harry walked along the south bank until he came to Century House, the old headquarters of SIS before it moved upstream to Vauxhall Cross. How many times had he visited this building over the years? Dozens, maybe scores. The British were junior partners in the firm, but courtesy calls were part of doing business. Harry always came away from these meetings with a sense that his British colleagues were better suited for the game than Americans were. They weren’t any better at keeping secrets, but they were better at telling lies.

Winkler was waiting for
him when he arrived at Vauxhall Cross. He had set up a secure video conference link with the embassy in Tehran so that Harry could talk directly with the station commander there. The SIS officer’s face was on the screen, staring into the video camera, his blond hair neatly combed and his tie knotted up to the top of the collar. He looked very young, but that was the way the British did it, in and out early. Winkler said his real name was Robin Austen-Smith, but not to use that during the conversation.

“Hello, Tehran,” said Adrian.

“Hello, London. Sorry I can’t see you on this hookup, but I hear you fine.”

“We won’t keep you long. Tell our American friend a bit about what we’ve learned on the Bullfinch matter,” said Adrian. Apparently that was the code they were using for the operation they had mounted over the past month.

“We believe the target works at an establishment called Tohid Electrical Company. It’s part of the Iranian nuclear establishment. We think it took over some of the functions of the Shahid Electric Company, when the Iranians closed down its covert activities in 2003. Tohid is probably owned by the Revolutionary Guard, and we think the personnel there are on a restricted, no-travel basis. But we don’t know that. We’ve never gotten inside.”

Harry was taking notes. In a whisper, he asked Adrian whether he could ask questions. His host nodded yes.

“We know a little about Tohid,” said Harry. “Your description fits what we have. Why do you think the target works there?”

“Because someone working there contacted our source, Ajax 1, with the programmed query. Probably better to leave the details offline. Mr. Winkler can explain them to you. We have a name for the target, too. We’ve done some checking on our end, based on some collateral we gathered, and we think it’s real. Mr. Winkler can give you that as well. But we haven’t taken any further action, pending word from London.”

“Good job,” said Harry. He turned toward Adrian and tipped an imaginary cap.

“Yes, well done, Tehran. An extra watercress sandwich for you at teatime.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Winkler flipped a switch and the video screen went fuzzy, and then dark.

“Fuck me,” said Harry
.
“You did it.”

“Not quite, old boy. But we started it. The question is, what do you want to do next?”

“I don’t know yet. Let’s start with the basics. What’s the name you’ve got?”

“Dr. Karim Siamak Molavi. He’s a scientist, attached to a covert department of Revolutionary Guards intelligence. His father was a dissident intellectual, anti-shah. The son studied in Germany, at the University of Heidelberg. His name surfaced on some scientific papers in the late 1990s, then disappeared.”

“Why’s he contacting us?”

“We don’t know. Maybe it’s a provocation. But probably he’s pissed off.”

“Why?”

“Because his cousin Hossein Shamshiri got cashiered six months ago from a senior position in the Rev Guard. He was a colonel. We picked up word of that after it happened. We did traces and found the family link to Shamshiri. That’s what Austen-Smith meant about ‘collateral.’”

“What did cousin Hossein do to get himself canned?”

“He picked a fight with the wrong guy. A Pasdaran general who was taking more than the normal cut from an enterprise Shamshiri was supervising. He complained to higher-ups about this un-Islamic behavior, but the general had friends. Someone at the top decided that cousin Hossein was a troublemaker and forced him out.”

“So Molavi has a motive?”

“Precisely. That’s what makes us think he’s legitimate.”

“Shit. You know a lot. You’ve been holding out on me, Adrian.”

“Not at all, mate. And don’t overstate the importance of a few stray facts we may happen to know. We remain a very poor relation, with our noses pressed up against the windows of our betters. Still, we do have a few crumbs of intelligence that we can bring to the high table.”