The Natanz Directive (17 page)

The helicopter made another pass up the valley and raced south, back toward the city. New traffic barked over the radio, orders for the men to rally.
Sorry for the disappointment, chumps.

The 4 × 4s with the machine guns emerged from the trees. The foot soldiers followed. The two troop trucks returned from wherever the hell they had gone. They gathered the troops, formed a column behind the 4 × 4s, and headed south along the Fasham–Tehran Road.

I kept still for another fifteen minutes. When I was sure the bad guys hadn't circled back, I opened a channel on my iPhone. I sent a new message to General Rutledge, which read:
Bear waiting. Went home hungry.
I attached the audio link from the Revolutionary Guards' radio transmissions.

I e-mailed a second message to Mr. Elliot. This one read:
Leak confirmed. Too many suspects to count.
I attached the audio link again and hit the Send button.

I was repacking my backpack when Mr. Elliot replied:
I'm on the hunt.
I was glad to hear that, of course, but there was almost no chance he would ferret out the leak in time to aid my mission. Then a second message appeared. It read:
Russian delivery in transit. Coordinates and codes to follow.
I stared at the words and shook my head. If it came to that, I was a dead man. But at least the mission wouldn't be a complete loss.

I shut down my phone. Now for my ride, whoever that was. I slithered out from under the juniper and hiked back to my original LZ, the rendezvous point for Mr. Elliot's contact. I tucked myself under the brush and waited.

At ten o'clock, a battered stake truck rumbled up the draw and came to a halt. A Chevy. A total waste of metal, if the exterior was any measure, but there was a healthy purr to the engine. The driver got out. He circled to the rear of the truck. He dropped the tailgate. A half-dozen goats hopped out and scampered into the grass. Very believable.

I watched for thirty seconds, waiting to see if the man had any company. He was alone. I resorted to the Zeiss telescope again and zoomed in on the man. He looked to be about six feet, tall for a Persian. He wore a rumpled khaki coat over cotton drawstring pants that might have been white in a past lifetime. He carried a wooden staff. Was that supposed to convince the world that he was a goatherder? Who knew?

I made him to be in his late thirties. He bore the leathery skin of a man who spent most of his time outside. He sported the scraggly, unkempt beard so common to Iranian men and wore a red-and-black kaffiyeh on his head.

I spent another thirty seconds scanning the area in case he had been followed. I switched to the thermal viewer to pierce the foliage. Nothing on both counts.

The man walked up the trail. He fished a small device from his coat pocket and I switched back to the Zeiss. I couldn't tell for sure, but it looked like a GPS. He walked to the exact center of my LZ and stopped. He pocketed the GPS and loitered there, stabbing the ground with the staff. He played the part well, giving all his attention to his goats, but his demeanor shouted:
I'm your guy. Do you want a ride to Tehran or not?

I stored the iPhone and the Zeiss and slung the backpack over one shoulder. I palmed the Walther in my left hand. I pulled a pair of sunglasses from my jacket pocket, put them on, and emerged from the shadows of the junipers. I started down the slope.

The man must have caught the sound of my footsteps. He turned almost casually. It was clearly not a defensive move, not a surprised one. Good. He tipped his head in my direction as I marched toward him. He tried to act disinterested, but the charade wasn't necessary. Two guys meeting in the middle of basically nowhere? Oh, yeah. Happens every day.

I stopped ten feet away, asked, “Got any Marlboros?” My Farsi sucked.

“No, sorry.” He shrugged. “All I have are Montecristo coronas.”

Right response, right demeanor. All good. But if he thought I was going to drop my guard, he was sadly mistake. I did offer my hand, however. “Those will have to do.” I gave him the name from my French passport: “Richard Moreau.”

He shook my hand. His was as dry and cracked as an old tree trunk. “Amin Panahi.” He smiled. Then he glanced skyward and quipped in English, “Nice of you to drop in. Looked like fun.”

He'd obviously seen my parachute. “A barrel of laughs,” I said with perhaps a touch too much sarcasm. I nodded in the direction of his truck. “Thanks for the lift. We'd better get going.”

He whistled. The goats perked up their ears and trotted toward us. Panahi herded them with his staff in the direction of the truck; he'd clearly done this before. One by one, the goats leaped into the back, their pointed hooves drumming the cargo bed. He closed the gate and secured it with a bent coat hanger. The weathered and rusted Chevy looked older than me. A real high-class ride. I'd have to give my compliments to Mr. Elliot. The guy really knew how to treat his operatives.

We climbed into the cab. A small plastic bucket of sunflower seeds rested between us on the tattered bench seat. The engine started with a wheeze and a grumble, then purred like a kitten. We made an about-face and headed down the rocky draw. The dirt path bisected a pair of low-lying hills and fell in with the Fasham–Tehran Road. We headed south, mimicking the path traveled by the 4 × 4s and the troop trucks of Revolutionary Guards. The road paralleled a fast-moving stream. Sporadic traffic became a steady flow the farther south we drove. The skyline of metropolitan Tehran loomed on the horizon and grew in stature with each passing mile.

Panahi offered the sunflower seeds. I shook my head and hoped I wasn't insulting him. He shrugged, dipped a hand into the bucket, and tossed a handful into his mouth.

“I will drop you near the grand bazaar,” he said, grinding the seeds between yellowed teeth. His hands gripped the wheel like a man wrestling an alligator. “The room you've been assigned is a three- or four-block walk. That's all I know. The exact address has been sent to you.”

“Good. Thanks.” I dug my iPhone from my pocket and powered it up. I opened my secured e-mail account, found messages from both Tom and Mr. Elliot, and started with the general's.
District 12, Harandi, 125, Tic-Tac-Toe
. District 12 was the municipal location of the Grand Bazaar. I remembered that. The address of the safe house was 521 Harandi. Tic-tac-toe meant my GPS would signal the right room when I arrived.

Mr. Elliot's e-mail was typically Mr. Elliot. One word:
improvise.
Oh, don't worry. I had every intention of improvising.

I closed down the phone. “We good?” Panahi asked.

“Good as gold,” I said.

Panahi looked at me a bit strangely. He was probably dying for an interpretation of “Good as gold,” but then the allure of gold was the same in pretty much any language. After about two seconds, I think he got it. He huffed what I took to be a less-than-enthusiastic endorsement of my affinity for clichés and gripped the wheel even tighter.

He stayed quiet. I wasn't interested in small talk either and did my part to reinforce this, staring at the grid of skyscrapers waltzing along the horizon.

Panahi busied himself with the task of keeping his rattletrap on the road while his gaze flitted nervously from mirror to mirror. We passed through the village of Roodak and three kilometers later merged with the main highway for Tehran. The more we drove, the more frequently Panahi dipped into the sunflower seeds.

Traffic backed up, and now I could see why. Orange cones funneled all southbound traffic into a single lane. Men in police uniforms with AK-47s checked each vehicle coming through.

I'd spent my career talking myself out of tight corners. As the moment of deception approached, I'd learned to cope by smothering any possible doubts or fears with self-confidence and faith. Meanwhile, Panahi munched nervously. Damn guy might as well have tattooed the word
suspicious
on his forehead.

“Relax, my friend,” I said in a voice that was far more businesslike than it was friendly. “Take a deep breath and relax.”

When it was our turn to advance to the checkpoint, he spit the wad of chewed husks out the window and let the truck roll forward. Two policemen. One stood out in front of the car with his hand resting lazily on the butt of a pistol riding high on his right hip. Panahi halted the Chevy next to the second policeman and rolled down his window. The cop leaned in. He was overweight and sloppy. He wore sunglasses and chewed on an unruly mustache. He wasn't nervous—I saw that—and he didn't carry himself like a man expecting trouble. All good.

I managed to catch snippets of his exchange with Panahi. I heard the words, but mostly I was studying his tone, his inflections, his tempo. Same conclusion.

“What is your business today?”

“What do you mean?” Panahi played it well. He cocked a thumb to the goats in the back. “You think I'm taking my flock out for a joyride?”

The policeman ignored the sarcasm and extended an open hand through the window. “Papers.”

Panahi handed the cop his ID. He studied it. Flipped it over. Studied it some more. “What is your destination?”

“The Grand Bazaar.”

The cop returned the ID and looked at me. “And you?”

“He's from the French Ministry of Agriculture,” Panahi answered. “Here to study how we raise animals.”

The policeman beckoned with his fingers. I gave him my passport.

He flipped through the passport and read my name. He pronounced it, “Ri-charde Mora?”

“Close enough,” I replied in French.

The cop studied me, eyes narrowing as if deciding what to do next. I looked at him with eyes so calm and warm that he might as well have been my best friend. My message was simple: don't cause trouble. Which translated into: don't make me shoot you between the eyes. I had already triangulated my position between him and his partner. If I had to, I could drop them both in a single heartbeat. After that? I'd have to ditch Panahi and commandeer a car. Things would get hairy. Again.

The policeman returned my passport and then did a rapid-fire exchange with Panahi, talking too fast for me to catch any of it. The cop took a step back and waved us through. Panahi dug into his cup of sunflower seeds and shoved a fresh handful into his mouth.

I looked into our rearview mirror. The policeman stared at us. His partner joined him. They exchanged a dozen words, then his partner spoke into a handheld radio.

A cataract of undeniable questions unraveled in my mind. Had Panahi given me away? Was the MEK—hell, or even the Iranian government—using him to shadow me? I didn't think so. He was Mr. Elliot's man. Mr. Elliot picked his people carefully. He trained them. He put them in the field only after they'd passed muster in situations a whole lot more dicey than a police roadblock.

“So?” I said.

“Tensions are high,” he answered. He nodded toward the police. “These pricks have been warned to trust no one. A foreigner is a foreigner. Even when he's traveling with a local.”

Great answer. Who could argue with that? He was right. Tensions were high in Tehran. They'd been high for thirty years, and the people had no one to blame but themselves.

We drove into Tehran, a city of fifteen million people with as much freedom as caged mice in a deceptively urban setting. Yeah, most of the world was quick to demonize Iran, but you couldn't tell it by the lush, well-manicured greenbelts lining the highway, and you couldn't tell it by the amenities and architecture as modern as Chicago's. You couldn't see the tension, not from the front seat of a pickup truck. But it didn't take much to imagine how much brighter this place would be without crazy zealots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his gang of mullahs riding their people's back.

A cell phone chirped from Panahi's coat pocket. He answered it in Farsi. “… Just crossed the Hemmat Highway…” A sideways glance to me. “Safe and sound.” He put the phone away and said in English, “All clear.”

“Who were you talking to?” He could tell by the tone of my voice that full disclosure was his only option. “Who?”

When he glanced across the console this time, he looked me right in the eye. We held that pose for a good three seconds. Then he gave his attention back to the road. His voice was calm when he said, “Do you really think I'd drive straight into Tehran with someone as important as you in my care without eyes and ears on our drop zone, Mr. Moreau?”

Another good answer. “Not if you wanted to live very long.”

“My life is not important. That we succeed is.”

I wanted to say,
You're breaking my heart,
but I didn't.

Panahi turned from the highway onto Shariati Street. We rattled down the road and curled in the direction of the city's sprawling downtown. Like Istanbul and so many other cities in Mesopotamia, the old and the new could hardly be separated in Tehran. You had to remember that the area we were driving through had first been settled more than eight thousand years ago. That's a lot of years and a lot of time for humans to mess up whatever had been good about this ancient land in the first place. You could travel through Tehran and see a thousand-year-old mosque across the street from a twenty-year-old steel and glass high-rise, a piece of junk that wouldn't last another fifty. Guess which one got the nod in my book?

The streets were packed with cars and buses, taxis and minicabs, bicycles and motor bikes. And thousands of people. It was hot in the cab now that we were moving at a snail's pace, and I rolled down the window. A cacophony of motors and mechanization melded with the shuffle of footsteps and a wave of competing voices.

I saw soldiers. I saw police. I heard sirens.

Pedestrians darted between cars, and my insides squirmed. Someone could jog right up to us and put a bullet through my brain. Well, maybe that was a little melodramatic, but I reached inside my coat and grasped my pistol nonetheless. I clicked the safety off, index finger resting on the trigger. Panahi made a left onto a side street lined with boxy row houses.