The Increment (2 page)

The taxi deposited the young man in Fereshteh Square, a half mile from the Ministry of the Interior. That was his joke. If you are going to defy them, do it in plain sight. He walked with his valise to a villa on Khosravi Street. On the first floor was the office of a small company owned by his uncle Jamshid, which fabricated aluminum siding for residential buildings. The young man helped out with the office paperwork sometimes, as a favor to his uncle. He had installed a computer a few months ago, and arranged for Internet access in his uncle’s name. He came by sometimes in the late afternoons to work on the books and send messages to his uncle’s suppliers here in Iran and in Dubai and Ankara. One of the Iranian companies had its own Internet server. It wasn’t hard to hack into it, and to write code that could make it seem as if a message had originated there when it had really come from somewhere else. The young man was good with computers: he knew how to smooth out the sand, as it were, so that there was no sign that anyone had come or gone.

The young man had his own key and let himself in the door of Uncle Jamshid’s office. A secretary was still there, an awkward girl from Isfahan who was a distant relative. She tidied up the wastebaskets and then said good night, leaving him alone. The young man had wanted to give her a few riyals for her trouble, but she left too quickly. Probably it was better this way; she might have remembered the tip. He powered up the computer and slipped a CD-ROM with his new software into the drive. It was cooler outside now. He turned on some music and let himself relax.

He was
posht-e-pardeh.
Behind the curtain. He had a secret. Or rather, he had a secret locked inside many other secrets. That was the Persian way. This was a land where it was bad manners to speak plainly; it was too forward, too disrespectful. If you asked a tradesman how much he wanted for his work, he would refuse payment and tell you it was for free. It wasn’t that he didn’t expect to be paid, but that he didn’t want to name a price. And so it was with this special secret. It was a gift, but it wasn’t for free. It told a truth, but not the one that you might at first have anticipated.

Why was he doing it? He couldn’t really have answered that, even to himself. It was an emotion more than a word. It was the sting of an insult repeated, the way they were now insulting his cousin Hossein. His cousin had been their faithful servant. He was one of the boys, the
bach-e-ha.
But still they had destroyed him. That was part of it. And there were his father’s words, always in his ear, and his example. His father had stood for something, and never wavered. Truly, the young man could not live as the person he had become. He was suffocating. He was losing respect for himself.

His bet was that the people he was contacting would not be stupid. Was that wise, with outsiders? It was like shaking hands; in Iran, the hand was limp and soft—deceptively submissive. But with these foreigners, they sometimes squeezed your hand so hard they might break the little bones—even though they meant it as a sign of friendliness. It had happened so often in Germany, that crushing greeting. It was barbaric, but forgivable. The culture of the West had so much to prove; it did not know how to hide. The young man began to type. If he was careful, and continued with what he had planned and no more, he would remain invisible. He would drop his pebble, and then he would wait.

Would they understand, the people at the other end of the pond who saw the motion in the water? He was frightened, but he tried to embrace this emotion. Fear can make you strong. His father had told him that, too, before he died. Fear is your master until the day you make a stand, and then it becomes your teacher and guardian. It guides you into the shadows; it instructs you in your lies. It is the cloak you wear as you prepare your revenge and your escape.

The Americans called him
“Dr. Ali.” He was, in the technical terminology of the Central Intelligence Agency, a “virtual walk-in.” He arrived late at night, logging on to agency’s public website, www.cia.gov, and then clicking on the little tab marked “Contact CIA,” which took the visitor to a bland invitation to commit treason: “If you have information which you believe might be of interest to the CIA in pursuit of the CIA’s foreign intelligence mission, you may use the form below. We will carefully protect all information you provide, including your identity.” Below that, for additional reassurance, was a notice that the agency used a special “secure socket layer” encryption system. No explanation was offered of what this impressive-sounding system actually did. But this visitor didn’t need help. He knew precisely what he was doing.

The electronic visitor uploaded his message in plain text so bland and obvious that it was easy to miss. Then he disappeared back into the ether. He left no footprint, no clue as to his motivation, no hint of why he had risked everything to whisper his secrets across cyberspace. He didn’t exist, really, except for these few bits of computer code.

It was a muggy
night in late June. A rainstorm had swept the city, and a humid predawn mist was rising over the trees that surrounded Main Headquarters. The handful of clerical workers who monitored the agency’s public website during the night shift were already packing up. They had spent the evening processing emails, most of them the equivalent of crank calls, looking for the one that might contain a scrap of real intelligence or a warning of a terrorist attack. The secret bureaucrats were tired; they wanted to find their cars out in the Brown Lot and Yellow Lot and get on home.

An African-American woman named Jana who had been working for the agency just three years was the first to notice the point of origin. The message had come from an Internet service provider in Iran. The first clerk who processed the message had missed it altogether. It was late, he was tired. He had already sifted a hundred messages. But Jana took a last scroll back through the incoming traffic as her shift was ending, and this one caught her eye.

Jana’s colleagues were already heading for the door, but she told them to go ahead; she would come along in a few more minutes. She was a single mother, going home to make breakfast for her daughter and send her off to high school in Fairfax. She was just a GS-9 and had traveled overseas just once, before the divorce, but she had that instinct, too. She knew that occasionally the strange people who sent anonymous messages to the CIA were for real. They knew secrets; they were angry at their government, or the security service, or maybe just at their boss down the hall. And they were Internet geeks who knew how to make contact from overseas without getting caught. Jana’s shop had tracked several dozen of these electronic contacts from China since she joined the unit, and a half dozen from Russia, but never an Iranian. So she stayed.

The message didn’t make much sense. It was just a list of dates and numbers. Maybe it was a technical document, maybe it was gibberish. Jana wasn’t sure, but she knew it was coming from a place that mattered.

“Iranian VW?” That was the subject line of Jana’s message forwarding the email. VW was the CIA’s shorthand name for these virtual walk-ins. She sent the message to the Information Operations Center, which managed computer tactics for the clandestine service. For good measure she copied the Near East Division, the Iran “issues manager” at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Iran Operations Division. That was too many addresses, it turned out, but how could she have known?

One of the cables
went to Harry Pappas, the new chief of the Iran Operations Division. He didn’t pay any attention to it the first day. He was so busy he couldn’t see the water, let alone the ripples.

Harry was a big man in what had become a little institution. He had a face that was lived-in: a large, soft mouth, cheeks that were creased by sun and late nights, curly hair that had turned the dull gray of burnt charcoal. The most forbidding thing about him was his eyes, which conveyed a ferocity and also a weariness that all his strength could not dispel. He had come into the agency as a paramilitary officer during the 1980s after a stint in the army, and had gotten his start training the contras in Nicaragua. He spoke Spanish badly back then, with a Worcester, Massachusetts, accent, and he had since added bad Russian and now bad Farsi. Yet people always seemed to understand Harry Pappas, no matter what language he spoke.

“If people don’t get what Harry is saying, he just talks louder.” That was what his best friend Adrian Winkler liked to say about him. Adrian was British, and as with most SIS officers, he was a proficient linguist who did his business in lower decibels. But like Harry, he was a prankster. No matter how bleak things looked, Harry couldn’t resist a wisecrack or an irreverent curse. That had helped him survive a career in the neverland of the clandestine service.

But Harry Pappas was wounded, and everyone knew it. He had lost his only son several years before, in Iraq. The mess over there was a stomachache for everyone at the agency, but for Harry it was something much worse. That was the reason he had taken the job running Persia House—to try to get through the pain.

Today it wasn’t working. His desk was full of paper he didn’t want to read. He had a request to brief the senior staff members of the Senate intelligence committee, whom he regarded as twerps and second-guessers. He had a summons, from the director no less, to brief a meeting of the NSC deputies committee. He wanted to say no to both but knew he couldn’t.

They all wanted the same thing. The CIA director, the director of National Intelligence, the White House, the congressional intelligence committees—they were all howling for more production from Tehran. If there wasn’t an item in the PDB each morning, the president would ask, “What about Iran?” The director had suggested that Harry to go to the White House once a week with the PDB briefer, to show the flag and make excuses, but Harry begged off. He didn’t trust himself in their company.

What Harry really wanted to tell the president was, “Get your finger out of my eye.” Go away, be patient, shut up. But that was the one thing he wasn’t allowed to say, to anyone, especially when the comptrollers of the secret budget were throwing money at him. They wanted more of everything—more case officers, more platforms, more recruitments. They seemed to think that intelligence was a spigot they could turn wide open if they just spent enough cash. Harry kept saying no. He couldn’t target the officers he had now, let alone a dozen more. The last thing he needed was more people bumping into each other, sending each other make-work cables. But they appropriated the money anyway. It made them feel they were doing something.

“Don’t fight the problem.” That was one of Harry’s mottoes, which he had picked up years ago in a biography of General George C. Marshall. He had puzzled over what it meant until it occurred to him one day that all the great man was saying was,
Solve the problem.
Figure out what it is, and then get it done. And Harry could do that. He wasn’t one of the smart guys who needed to show everyone how hard they were thinking. He was from Worcester. He had come up as a knuckle-dragger in paramilitary. He was happy if people took him for granted.

So Harry was patient: he knew the Iranian agents were out there. They were angry and greedy and lonely and needy. This one had been disrespected by the Revolutionary Guard. That one hadn’t gotten the promotion he wanted. One man resented the corrupt officials who ran his program. Another man’s wife had cancer that could only be treated in the West. This father wanted his children to succeed. That father has lost his only child and wanted to fill the emptiness. One was idealistic. Another was avaricious. This man had a mistress who wanted money. That man was a homosexual. Take your pick. They were out there. Harry knew it. He had lists of dozens of people his case officers would pitch, if they ever got close enough.

What Harry didn’t realize was that his man had already arrived. His message was sitting in Harry’s in-box, waiting to be read.

Harry’s wife Andrea was
out when he got home. She did volunteer work three evenings a week at a Greek Orthodox church in McLean. It was her form of penance. His daughter Louise was in the family room watching
Sex and the City
reruns. Harry sat with her for a while, drinking a beer, but he felt uncomfortable. The characters were talking about penises. He gave his daughter a good-night kiss and went up to bed. She was relieved to see him go, so she could watch television in peace.

Trying to get to sleep, Harry thought of his son, who had been killed in Iraq in 2004. The agency hadn’t been tough enough for him, so he had joined the Marines. “Makeshift roadside bomb” was the caption under his picture in the “Faces of the Fallen” gallery that ran in the
Washington Post
, which made it sound like a sort of traffic accident. Back then, at least, his son had been able to think it all might lead to something good. He had been spared as a last thought: What a fucking mistake. But not Harry. He didn’t sleep well that night, but he never did anymore.

Harry Pappas made his
way to Persia House the next morning. He had a good parking spot near the front entrance now. They were all trying to be nice to him, as if he were a fragile instrument that might crack down the middle if it wasn’t handled with care. Harry walked through the electronic gate with his head down, ignoring the guard and the colleagues arriving for work. It was six forty-five, and most of the other early risers made a point of looking perky, but not Harry. Persia House was down Corridor C in the Main Headquarters building, past a glass display case that housed an old gray spy submarine. There was a little ramp off to the right, and at the top of the ramp a cyberlocked door. And next to it, so small that it was barely visible, was a sign that said
IRAN OPERATIONS DIVISION
.

The first face Harry saw when he opened the door was that of the Imam Hussein. It was a brightly colored life-size poster Harry had purchased in the central market in Baghdad when he was station chief. The image startled visitors, which was why Harry put it there. We’re not in Kansas anymore, boys and girls. He had mounted it just inside the front door of Persia House, next to the receptionist’s desk, so that young officers who knew the streets of Tehran only from overhead reconnaissance could see it and understand, perhaps just a little, what a peculiar country Iran was.

It was a cheap, almost luridly sentimental poster, the sort of thing that would embarrass an educated Iranian, but it had the cartoon energy of folk religion: the martyr’s sweet, dark-eyed gaze; his skin as fine as rice paper; his black hair as silky as a leopard’s fur; his eyes moist with tears for the tragedy that lay ahead. When Iranians looked into those limpid eyes, they cried too, in shame and rage. The face spoke of the wound that never healed, of the martyr’s blood that flowed like a perpetual fountain. The story was so cruel: the Prophet’s descendant lured by the evil Yazid and murdered on the plain of Kerbala. Iranians marked the awful betrayal every year, whipping themselves into a collective hysteria. The abiding message was that history is a conspiracy against the believers. And if that were so, what counterconspiracies were not permissible?

Harry stopped to look at the poster each morning, to put himself in the mind of people for whom the events of A.D. 680 were as yesterday. The Iranians understood suffering. They knew that the decent young men were betrayed by the deceit and blunders of others. They knew that goodness is a secret and that happiness is an illusion. That was what Harry had in common with them.

Harry Pappas hadn’t wanted to become head of the Iran Operations Division. After Baghdad, he had hoped to disappear into a senior staff job somewhere, jump to a safe lily pad, or perhaps just retire like most of his friends. Sign up for the “Horizons” course and be done with it. He was broken inside. Iraq had done that; not the big war that had destroyed everyone, but the private and desolate grief that comes from personal loss. The agency was broken, too, but that wasn’t Harry’s problem. Or at least, he didn’t want to think it was.

But the director had made a special appeal, and several of his closest friends had told him it was his duty. The only way to avoid another Iraq was to have the right people do Iran. They told Harry he was the best; he was the teacher; he was the one who could say no and also yes. Harry might have walked away even from that, he was still hurting so much. But his wife Andrea told him that taking the job would help him get over Alex; that it was a way to keep faith with his dead son. That otherwise, he would die.

So Harry said yes, and he put the picture of the Imam Hussein up on the wall to remind himself that he was living in the country of betrayal and pain.

Harry’s office was just
inside the heavy door. There was a big oak desk for him, a fat leather couch for visitors, and against the back wall, a conference table and chairs for staff meetings. The room had no windows, and when the door was closed, it was an airless and colorless tomb of secrets. Harry hadn’t bothered to decorate the office. He had cartons of memorabilia from his previous assignments—in Tegucigalpa, Moscow, Beirut; even a brief stint with an earlier Iranian “virtual station” known as “TehFran,” located in Frankfurt, Germany. But he didn’t have the heart to unpack all the old junk. It would only have depressed him to see the artifacts of his life up on the walls, so he left them in the boxes. As for the medals and testimonials from the agency, he had destroyed them, one by one, the night of Alex’s funeral.

Harry’s senior staff gathered
in his spartan office for the morning meeting. They were kids, most of them. The agency was becoming like a university, with a few old professors and the rest young people who were called “officers” and perhaps had even had a tour or two overseas but were more like students. There was no middle; only a top and bottom. That was the good part for Harry, the fact that most of his young colleagues hadn’t learned to game the system yet. Harry took his seat at the head of the conference table, his body too big for the chair.

“Sobh bekheir az laneh jasoosi,”
said Harry. It was the same Farsi phrase he used each morning. Good morning from the nest of spies.

“What do we have overnight?”

“Mostly we have a lot of nothing,” rasped back Marcia Hill. She had a thin smile on her face, although Harry couldn’t understand why.

Marcia Hill was Harry’s deputy, a woman in her late fifties with a weathered face and a voice pleasantly ruined by whiskey and cigarettes; she had the tawdry appeal of a been-around movie actress. Marcia was Persia House’s institutional memory—the last survivor from the Iran desk of 1979 when the embassy in Tehran had been seized and U.S.-Iranian relations had ground to a thirty-year halt. She had been a reports officer, in one of the shit jobs they gave women back then. But she had taught herself Farsi and made herself useful to the burnouts from NE Division who handled the “Iran target.”

During the wasteland years, she became the repository of information about Iranian operations. She remembered names and family connections and botched leads—she was the only person, really, who knew just how badly the agency had done in its efforts to recruit spies in Iran. For her trouble, she was exiled to Support—where Harry found her, already halfway out the door to retirement. She felt sorry for Harry; that was the only reason she said yes.

Marcia ran through the string of operational messages they had received overnight from their listening posts in Dubai, Istanbul, Baku, and Baghdad, and from the several dozen other platforms that were woven together into the Persia House net. Her tally was a series of foul balls and strikeouts. A case officer in Istanbul had cold-pitched an Iranian on holiday in Turkey who was believed to be a member of the Revolutionary Guard. He had fled. A case officer under commercial cover in Dubai had met with an Iranian banker on the pretext of discussing an investment in Pakistan. The Iranian had said he would think about it, which meant that he wouldn’t. A case officer in Germany had shadowed an Iranian scientist attending a conference. He had two minders from the Ministry of Intelligence with him whenever he left his room; the case officer couldn’t get close. As Marcia said, it was a lot of nothing.

“What about the pitch list?” asked Harry. “Any new names?”

Persia House had a list of Iranian scientists it monitored and updated. They had been compiling it for years, adding every graduate student who passed through Europe, every Iranian who had his name on a scientific paper published in an academic journal, every traveler who came out with a purchasing team to buy laboratory gear or computer hardware. Anyone on this list who passed across an international frontier was a blinking light—a potential recruit. But the prize targets rarely traveled anymore, at least not alone. The Iranians weren’t stupid. They knew what we wanted. When they let someone go overseas unescorted, it was usually a dangle.

Tony Reddo spoke up. He was a young officer on loan from WinPac, the unit that monitored nuclear weapons technology for the agency. He was so young Harry wondered if he had started shaving yet. He had gotten his doctorate in nuclear physics when he was twenty-four, and now he was all of twenty-six. The other kids in the office teased him because he was so smart.

“We’re tracking three new papers,” said Reddo. “On neutronics, hydrophonics, and wave dynamics. We’re running traces on the names. No new delegations to report. No travelers.”

“Anything new to work with from overseas? Anywhere?”

“Not yet,” said Reddo. He glanced over to Marcia Hill, who gave him a wink, out of Harry’s sight.

“Christ!” said Harry. He sighed and turned to Marcia. “Tomorrow is another day. Right, Scarlett?”

“Give me a break, Harry.” She still had a trace of a smile on her face, despite all the bad news. She was holding something back.

Harry wanted to sound cheery for his kids, but it was a struggle. There was always tomorrow, until they ran out of time and there wasn’t. That was how the business really worked: people making lists and waiting for the moment, which usually didn’t come. It was like the old days in Moscow: you didn’t make things happen; they happened to you. You waited for some crazy fucker to throw something over the wall, and then you tried to figure out how to keep him alive.

“Anything else?” Harry asked.

“Yeah,
one
thing,” said Marcia with a sly nod. “You probably missed this. It came in yesterday from the website. They think it’s a VW. I showed it to Tony. We think it’s interesting. You ought to look at it.”

“Can it wait?” said Harry. He wanted to focus on real cases, not chaff from the website.

“Sure, anything can wait. But I think you’re going to want to see this. Tony can explain.”

Reddo was brandishing some pieces of paper he had printed out. He was such a kid. He laid the papers down on the conference table like a puppy who has found a bone.

“What is this shit?” asked Harry, motioning to the papers.

“Assays,” said Reddo.

“Come again?”

“Nuclear assays. Believe it or not, I think they are measurements of uranium enrichment.”

“From Iran? Are you shitting me?”

“No, sir. There are notations about the composition of the sample, here, see? I don’t really follow that. But look at the rows. I think they show the enrichment level after each pass through the cascade. They’re just like IAEA documents. That was what got me thinking. I’ve seen stuff like this before, same patterns and categories. Now look at the columns. I think they are measuring what emerges—the enriched product and the depleted tails. See how the one goes up, with each pass, and the other goes down? And see numbers here at the bottom? There’s one batch that’s marked thirty-five percent, and another that’s marked seven percent. And next to the second one there’s a little note that says D
₂
O, with a question mark. See that?”

“Yeah, I see it. What does it mean?”

“Let me think.” Reddo scratched his head. It was hard to explain complicated things simply.

“So it means the Iranians are enriching uranium, just like they always say. But the strange part is the two batches. One says seven percent. That’s what you use to fuel a nuclear reactor. Okay. That’s interesting. The other batch is thirty-five percent. Uh-oh. That’s more than they need for a reactor. So you have to assume that’s for a weapons program. They’ll keep enriching more and more, until they hit weapons grade, which is above ninety percent. That’s bad news, but it’s not really a surprise. We figured they were going in that direction. So they’re halfway there. What’s super weird is the ‘D
₂
O question mark’ notation.”

Harry rolled his eyes. He had gotten a C in high school chemistry and he had never taken a physics course.

“Explain it for the dumb guy. What’s D
₂
O?”

“It’s the symbol scientists use for heavy water. Regular water—‘light’ water—is H
₂
O, two hydrogen atoms and one of oxygen. Heavy water has two deuterium atoms for each oxygen. And heavy water is what you use in the kind of reactor that can make plutonium. That’s the creepy part. Maybe this notation means they’re thinking of diverting the seven percent batch to a heavy-water reactor for a plutonium bomb program. In which case they wouldn’t need to enrich it at all.”

“The Iranians have plans for a heavy-water reactor at Arak, right?” said Harry. “But it isn’t operational. Unless we’ve missed something.”

“Uh, yeah,” said Reddo. “That’s the point, I guess.”

“Shit.” Harry shook his head. “And you think it’s real? The document.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Probably.”

“Which means it came from someone inside the program?”

“Gotta be. Or someone with access.”

“Well, fuck me,” Harry said, shaking his head. “Where the hell did this come from?”

Reddo pointed to an email address at the bottom of the message. It said [email protected].

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Um, I think
that’s
the return address. That’s how we contact the guy who sent this.”

Harry closed his eyes. “Sweet Jesus,” he said. “We’re inside.”

Harry asked Marcia Hill
to stay behind when the meeting ended. He wanted to think out loud a moment before the Iranian message took on a life of its own. Marcia had a card-room smile. She lived for moments like this. She had put up with the shit for so long, she wanted to enjoy the rare good parts. But Harry needed to worry it, poke some holes in it before he let it out.

“This has to be bullshit,” said Harry.

“No it doesn’t. Sometimes good things happen. Even to us.”

“Why would someone do it? Explain that. He’s giving up big secrets. Why would someone send a message like this, on an open Internet line, out of the blue?”

“It’s a calling card,” said Hill. “He wants to talk. Or she.”