The Natanz Directive (27 page)

At the last second, the Jet Ranger flared upward to bleed off airspeed. A cloud of dust lifted from the roof. Jeri leveled the copter and raked her landing skids close to me, turbine engine screeching, rotor blades churning the air.

“What are you waiting for?” she shouted.

I dived onto the backseat. The helicopter accelerated upward. The roar was deafening. I rolled into a sitting position and snapped the seat harness over my shoulders and waist. I gripped my iPhone, stared down at the screen, and activated the self-destruct mechanism on the suitcase bomb. Thank God.

Wind whipped through the open cabin. I leaned to the left and glanced out the door. Security guards burst out of the hatchway on the school roof and began firing. Bullets sprayed us from the adjacent roof, wild shots that couldn't keep up with the forward motion of the Jet Ranger at full throttle.

I watched until we were well out of range. When I turned around, Charlie was holding out a headset for me. I slipped it over my ears.

“So?” I heard him say.

First, I held out the iPhone. He read the screen, and his eyes doubled in size. Then I pulled the phone away.

“Pay dirt,” I answered, as we disappeared over the hills west of Qom and the first hint of dawn peeked above the horizon.

An hour later. Charlie handed me hot tea, Iranian style, in a short glass with one sugar cube. My hair was still wet from a hot shower and my face tingled from a welcome shave. He, Jeri, and I had just finished a late lunch of fried spinach and eggplant with yogurt, onions, and garlic. I was dying for a cheeseburger.

We hadn't gone back to Seyfabad, and we hadn't returned to Tehran. We'd gone south from Qom seventy or eighty miles to Kashan. Jeri had ditched the chopper at a private airport a mile from the city. The safe house was in an old neighborhood populated by painters and sculptors and papermakers, as Charlie described it.

He was expounding on Kashan's history. “Like everything in Iran, it's been overrun and pillaged by the best of them. Arabs, Mongols, Persians, and who knows all. That's what happens when you've been around for five thousand years.”

Jeri wore the same tank top she'd been wearing during my rescue. It showed miles of skin the color of burnished walnut; I could have stared at her all day. She said, “If you had the time, you could walk into town and find a silk scarf for your wife unlike anything you could find anywhere else in the world. But you better get it quick before the mullahs make the arts a footnote in Iranian history.”

“What's really special about Kashan is that Natanz is only forty miles away,” Charlie said. He knew that was my next destination. “I assume that's the plan.”

“Strike while the iron's hot, my friend. The Revolutionary Guards will know their security has been breached. I figure I have twenty-four hours max before everything within five hundred miles of Qom is battened down tighter than a drum,” I said. I looked across at Charlie. He had chosen a hardback chair and a stiff posture. His cup and saucer were balanced in his hands like an artist with his brush and palette. “But you've done enough, Charlie. You and Jeri risked your necks for me back there. I won't forget. We're square.”

Charlie looked over at Jeri. He was grinning. She looked like she was ready to take my head off. “He's no Persian, is he?” he said.

“No, but I like his style anyway,” she said unexpectedly.

“In our country, as fucked up as it may be, it's the debtor who decides when a debt is paid. You've still got work to do, and we've still got a traitor to find,” he said. “I'm in for the long haul.”

“And I'm just beginning to enjoy myself,” Jeri said. “But it's up to you, Abu.”

Abu? What the hell?
Abu
meant “father” in Arabic. My eyes swept the room. Charlie must have seen it on my face. But he didn't say anything. Instead, he pulled a laptop from a case on the floor and set it up on the table.

While he was powering it up, he said, “I heard from Bagheri. You lit a fire under his ass. He's got people searching high and low for his mole.”

I shook my head. “Bad move. All he's going to do is make it harder for us to find the bastard.”

“Don't I know it. But there might be an upside. He raises enough hell, it might keep Security out of our hair for a while. My guys are narrowing things down. They're tracking twenty-six known MEK operatives who seem to have hidden agendas.”

“Moradi?” For some reason, I didn't want it to be Moradi. He'd been chumming for the MEK in Amsterdam for thirty years. We'd partnered enough times to know we were on the same side. Or so I thought.

“Not Moradi. But Karimi and Drago keep coming to the surface,” Charlie said.

“Okay. We have to flush our guy out,” I said. “We have to set a lure for the twenty-six possibilities on our list. We have to use the communication links your guys have established to hint at various rendezvous sights around Tehran. See who bites.”

“I'm on that,” Jeri said, rising from her chair with the grace of gymnast on a balance beam. “I'll set up a video conference with Amur.” She glanced at me. “Amur. The guy with the bow tie. We'll have something out on the wire in an hour.”

“Keep it subtle, Jeri,” I said. “This guy's smart. We don't want to spook him.”

She nodded briskly—the soldier replacing the gymnast in the blink of an eye—and hustled out.

“Consider it done,” Charlie said, as if I might have misgivings about a twenty-six-year-old screwing up our counterintelligence op. Nope, not this twenty-six-year-old. I'd share a foxhole with her any day of the week. Charlie turned the computer screen my way. “Professor Fouraz came through again. He sent another batch of photographs from Natanz and a couple of audio links.”

Charlie put the photographs up on the screen. The first batch showed unmarked semi-trailers escorted by unmarked SUVs. All the men wore sunglasses and most weren't particularly discreet about hiding their weapons: MP5 submachine guns, Beretta auto-shotguns, and the ubiquitous AK-47s.

There had been times when I ran three or four ops at a time. I could have been circling the wagons on an arms-smuggling ring in Mexico and targeting a band of Chinese heroin dealers in Washington, D.C., while working the Iranian cartel in Florida and a trafficking operation out of Bangkok. The bottom line was always intel. Gather it, package it, send it off to Mr. Elliot to analyze and act upon. It wasn't my job to figure it all out, but figuring it all out more or less came with the territory. Figuring it out helped me plan my next move. Figuring it out kept me alive.

That's what I was doing now—staying alive, completing the mission.

“Knowing what we know now about Qom, it has to work this way,” I said. I was really talking to myself, even though Charlie had settled in next to me on the couch. I jabbed a finger at the big rigs in the photos. “The trailers carry enriched-uranium ingots made in Qom. Once the ingots arrive in Natanz, they're fabricated into warheads.”

I had transmitted the photos from the enrichment facility in Qom to General Rutledge and Mr. Elliot the moment we landed in Kashan, but I hadn't heard back from either of them yet. I knew it would take some time. I had handed them intel no one had ever seen before; they were probably creaming all over themselves trying to figure out what to do with it.

Charlie clicked to the next group of photos. This batch depicted a convoy of panel trucks, again escorted by unmarked SUVs. It came with an audio link. “Let's hear what the good professor has to say about these.”

He clicked the link. I recognized Professor Fouraz's voice, and it didn't take a guy trained in voice recognition to hear the strain. He was saying, “These trucks are on their way to Natanz. That I know for sure.”

“And the payload?” I asked, as if he were sitting across from us.

“From everything I have been able to find out, they're hauling special tanks containing deuterium. Collected in the heavy-water facility at Arak.”

I waited for more, but the audio link had closed.

“That's deducing a lot from a couple of panel trucks,” I said. Deuterium was a hydrogen isotope used to slow neutrons inside nuclear reactors: a good thing. More ominously, it was used to boost the yield of a nuclear bomb.

I clicked to a third series of pictures. These showed long cylindrical objects lashed to flatbed trailers and covered with acres of some reflective material. The shapes were identical to the one Fouraz had shown me yesterday. Sejil-2 ballistic missiles. Had to be.

But instead of speculating, I clicked a second audio link. In this one, the professor's voice was more clipped, more urgent. “These are casings for Sejil-2 ballistic missiles.” Bingo. “Twenty-one such missiles were delivered this month to the underground facility in Natanz.”

I shook my head, though it wasn't surprise I was feeling. “Ahmadinejad is fielding a strike force, Charlie.”

“You need to get in there,” he said. His cell phone rang. He came to his feet and put the phone to his ear. He spoke Farsi to whoever the caller was, and I sensed some annoyance in his voice. When he was done, he snapped the phone closed like a man who had spent too much time away from his business. He said, “I've got a problem with a shipment of Toyota car parts.”

He turned on his heels and left me alone in the room. Good. I needed the privacy. I checked my iPhone. There was a call tag from General Rutledge marked “urgent alert.” I guess pretty much everything was going to be urgent from here on out. I activated a secure video uplink. The general wore his gray camouflage uniform, and I could heard engines rumbling in the background.

He jumped right into the call. “Excellent intel. I won't ask how you got it.”

“Your guys see it the way I did?”

“Roger that.” In other words, proof positive that Ahmadinejad was manufacturing enriched uranium at a rate that far exceeded his domestic, commercial needs. “The son of a bitch finally did it. He's got nukes. We're going public with it.”

He didn't mean “public” in the conventional sense. He meant that the information would be going to fellow intelligence groups in Israel, England, France, and probably a half-dozen other nations.

“There's more,” I said. I told him about the deuterium, the enriched uranium, and a battery of twenty-one missiles that apparently had arrived in Natanz over the last month.

Rutledge squinted. I sensed his mind wrestling with the implications.

“Okay,” he said. I heard the profundity in that one word and calculated the intensity in his gesture. Conclusion? He was about to hit me with another round of fun and games. Just what I needed. “The Iranians need more than enriched uranium to make viable weapons worth mounting on a Sejil-2 missile. You know that. They have yet to build a working bomb because they're not going to waste the time or money making a weapon they can't deploy.”

This was all open-source information. You could hear it on FOX News. I waited for the twist. Tom said, “One bottleneck in fielding a credible strike force is collecting enough precision electronics needed to arm and fuse the ballistic nuclear warheads.”

“I'm with you,” I said, meaning,
Get to it, my friend. The clock's ticking.

The general reached off the screen to touch an unseen button. “Which brings me to him. Take a look.”

A jumble of colored pixels replaced Tom's image. The pixel resolution coalesced and sharpened into a photograph of a man standing next to an airline ticket counter. I recognized Atash Morshed, the online banker from Amsterdam responsible for laundering Iranian drug money and funneling it back into their weapons program.

“The photo you're looking at was taken at the Beijing airport six days ago. It took that long for the computers to put two and two together.”

“That's why I'm
so
fond of computers,” I said with razor-sharp sarcasm.

“Then you'll appreciate this,” Tom said. “See his briefcase? Our agents in China have hard and fast evidence that our Amsterdam friend was in town, shopping product.”

He didn't need to say that Morshed was shopping for special microelectronic circuit boards. The very type needed for finalizing the nukes. It was obvious.

“Our friend's face wasn't a priority fit until we finally got it on a fast track. Our guys in China made the connection the same day.”

“Good work.” I meant it.

“Our online banker has made a fortune laundering money and smuggling drugs using Iran as a conduit. At some point you have to pay the piper.”

“So it doesn't take much to speculate that Ahmadinejad finally called in his marker and sent our friend on an errand to buy the components.”

Tom nodded. “We need verification.”

“You think he's in Iran,” I said. I meant Morshed.

“The timing fits. And if he's in Iran with circuit boards meant for those Sejil-2s…”

“Then Natanz is probably on his itinerary,” I said. “High stakes.”

“The highest.”

“It wouldn't hurt for me to have a picture of those circuit boards. Can you make that happen?”

“I'll send a close-up with the model number.”

I stared at his face. “There's something else. What is it?”

“Our friend in Virginia isn't happy. You've cut him out.”

“I'm not going there. He's compromised. Or someone on his team is.” My voice could not have been calmer. “I'm more concerned about our friend on Pennsylvania Avenue.” I was talking about Landon Fry, the president's chief of staff. “He jump ship yet?”

“He and I are having a face-to-face later today. A full update.”

I shook my head. “That doesn't answer my question.”

I hung up. “Politicians.” The word came out more like a hiss. And why not. Snakes, every one of them.

I had no sooner disconnected the call with General Rutledge than my iPhone flashed two message prompts. The first was from Tom and contained a stock photo of the Chinese circuit board in question, listed as model number 378-98NB574. The Chinese didn't mess around. The 378 was a ten-layer board so thin and light that you would expect it to crumple in a stiff breeze. They were protected with some sort of laminate material that I didn't recognize and resistant to temperatures up to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The boards were ten-by-six, which meant Atash Morshed would need a small suitcase or a decent-size briefcase to transport them. This struck me as important. It meant that the product could travel from Beijing to Natanz and never leave his sight.