The Natanz Directive (35 page)

I wasn't all that good at the rules of the unwritten sidebar back when the bad guys were drug lords and cyber terrorists and arms dealers. Back then, Mr. Elliot and some other guys I never knew and never wanted to know were in charge of turning the intel into action; I rarely had the pleasure of taking down the criminals I'd set up. Now the bad guys were men with their fingers on the launch codes of Sejil-2 missiles with twenty-kiloton warheads in tow. Hard to be objective. Hard not to want to be the guy driving a stake into their hearts and stomping on their ashes.

The van delivered me back to the Grand Bazaar. I went to a cyber café on Green Square, prepaid for a connection, and downloaded the material from the memory stick directly onto my iPhone.

Then I opened a secure satellite link to the NSA. The files were text files and small. They transmitted in seconds.

No sooner had I unplugged the memory stick than my phone vibrated with an incoming call from Mr. Elliot.

I switched to the phone app, stood up, and walked toward the madness of the Grand Bazaar at seven thirty at night. Things were just getting started in corridors lined with shops selling everything from children's toys and teak carvings to tripe and the spices to cook it in. I stopped to look at a copper urn and said into the phone, “Go.”

“The files came through,” Mr. Elliot said. The edge in his voice was as subtle as a blade of grass on a football field. I heard it. “I gotta say, the friggin' hair stood on the back of my neck when I read the hit list. Bad.”

“Bad,” I agreed. I tried looking like a tourist engrossed in the abundance of Persian artistry on display, moved two steps to my right, and settled in front of a glistening silver platter. “You get The Twelver's pond?” I meant Ahmadinejad's bunker.

“He and all his fat-cat buddies. Definitely. Bluebird came through on that one. That's a serious prize. Well done.”

I wasn't all that taken by the compliment. I might feel better about it after a Tomahawk missile burned down the place, if and when that ever happened. I said, “How's our intel stacking up?” In other words, did we have enough to hit them before they hit us?

“We've got eagles and owls all over Europe and the UK locked and loaded,” he said.

This was the real deal. General Rutledge called it “Big George.” He'd been planning it for years. A single wave. A thousand targets. And Iran's nuclear capacity destroyed in one fell swoop by U.S. aircraft armed with the most powerful bunker busters ever created.

You make it massive, precise, and stealthy, and you light up the targets with boots on the ground. Can't have one without the other. That was my job.

Big George called for an initial wave of B-2 stealth bombers, F-117s, and F-22s, the “eagles” Mr. Elliot was referring to. Their job was to cripple Iran's long-range radar and strategic air defenses. The “owls” were carrier-based F-18s and F-15s, and F-16s launching from ground bases all over the Middle East with one goal in mind: to take out places like Qom and Natanz and to blow their missile sites to smithereens.

“But we need those addresses,” I heard Mr. Elliot say. He was talking about the launch sites. “Hate to put such a fine point on it.”

“Wish I had a back-up plan to Bluebird, but I'm playing all the cards I've got right at the moment. He promised me the addresses the minute they're finalized, and he's probably one of the guy's finalizing them,” I said.

I saw their reflection in the flat surface of the silver platter. Two men. It was a flash that came and went in an instant, but I knew they were wrong for the bazaar. I yanked the silver platter from the rack and turned into the orange flash of an exploding gun barrel. I had enough time to decide that my attackers were less than fifteen feet behind me, and that they wouldn't waste a bullet on a head shot. Bad odds. No, a chest shot would give them three or four inches on either side of the sternum, and I'd still be dead.

I wrenched the platter around and took the bullet full force. It blew me backward into the shop display. Silverware and copperware flew in every direction. A second bullet missed by inches, but only because I was tumbling backward and hit the floor in a heap of platters and pitchers and teacups.

I was acutely aware of the noise—the roar of a third shot, a cacophony of screaming and shouting, the clatter of metal—but I turned all my attention to the one chance I had for escape. I rolled to my left, lifted a hammered copper plate in my right hand, and launched it like a Frisbee in the direction of the two men. Now I saw them. Dressed in black from head to foot, as if they'd just jumped off motorcycles. One wore a stocking hat. His gun was still smoking. The other was shouting and throwing a stunned woman with shopping bags in each hand out of the way.

The flying plate was enough to cause a hitch in their steps, enough for me to spring to my feet and dash to the back of the silver shop. I knew from my experience with the herb-and-spice shop not an hour earlier that there were loading platforms out back. I felt bad pushing aside the shop owner, but she was standing between me and the back door. Her scream told me she was more angry than hurt, which meant she might take it out on the two men pursuing me. Probably not.

I threw open the door. The platform was a narrow block of concrete. I took two long strides and jumped. I landed on an asphalt lane between a van and a pickup truck and three men with crates in their arms. I heard the door slam behind me and shouting. I glanced back as I raced along the lane, dodging delivery trucks. The man in the stocking cap was talking into a walkie-talkie. I didn't bother to reach for my Walther. A firefight was not something I would survive. I ran until the lane made a slight dogleg left, used a panel truck to shield me from my pursuers, and leaped onto the nearest loading platform. A door led back inside the bazaar and into an electronics store mobbed with customers. The store opened onto a corridor that was wall-to-wall people.

I eased into the crowd. I worked my way toward the middle of the aisle, where the traffic flow was a little steadier. If only I hadn't been taller than everyone else.

Fifty paces farther on, the corridor forked. I took the right fork into a long, narrow food court. I'd been in the Grand Bazaar only once before, and that had been two decades earlier. All I remembered for sure was that there were a dozen entrances and exits. Find one, and I'd be home free. Maybe.

I had the strangest thought as I carved my way through hordes of patient shoppers. Who knew I was going to be in the bazaar at exactly that moment? General Navid, General Navid's cousin, and the guy in the van. Charlie and Jeri. Bagheri and Moradi. No one else. It was an unlikely group. Allies, one and all, right? Apparently not.

I needed time to think, and Leila came to mind at that exact moment. She'd given me a key to her place. I hated using it. I wasn't sure I had a choice.

I saw the entrance up ahead. In the second-to-last booth before the entrance was a man roasting beef-and-vegetable kabobs over an open fire pit. I took the memory stick Navid had given me from my pocket. I slid up to the fire pit as the man was waiting on a group of three women and tossed the stick into the flames.

I hailed the first taxi that I saw. I handed him enough rials to get me halfway across town and gave him an address on Jalilabad Street, close but not too close to Leila Petrosian's market. I circled the block and entered the alley behind her place. Her car was not there, so I used the key she had given me to open the back door.

I eased the door closed. I called her name. “Leila. You here? Hey, it's Jake?”

I didn't need Rahim—clerk, protector, and jealous suitor—rushing in with a gun or a knife or the police in tow. “It's me, Jake,” I said again, and moved from the entrance into the lounge that Leila used to introduce her customers to illegal contraband, which was her primary source of revenue. I could feel Leila in the room just by looking at the simple, classy way she'd arranged the velvet love seat and the leather chairs and the soft light spilling from perfectly placed wall sconces.

I went to the bar and poured single-malt scotch into a cocktail glass. The heat of the liquor exploding in my stomach wasn't quite enough to take the edge off the encounter in the bazaar, but it helped. I carried the glass to the love seat and settled in. I took a second sip and closed my eyes. I wrestled the temptation of a quick nap. Sleep and food had not been much of a priority over the last twelve days, and I felt the nerve endings in my arms and legs twitching.

Keep your mind on business, Jake. Figure it out. Who knew you were going to be at the bazaar at exactly that moment?
I kept coming back to Bagheri and Moradi. They were MEK. Everyone they knew and trusted was MEK. Believing that there was a traitor among them stung. You naturally tried to talk yourself out of believing it could actually be true. You confided in people, never thinking the people in your confidence would betray you. Yeah, well, somebody did.

I didn't know Bagheri's hierarchy. I didn't know his top lieutenants, and that was a mistake. I did know Moradi's. Ora Drago was his second-in-command in Amsterdam and a rising star in the MEK upper echelon. Why would he kick away everything he'd worked for by pulling a Benedict Arnold? Didn't make much sense, but stranger things had happened.

I was about to call Jeri to find out how our surveillance op was shaping up—I wanted her to give special attention to Ora Drago—when my iPhone chimed. The number on the screen belonged to Professor James Fouraz.

I sat straight up and nearly spilled my drink. If it actually was Fouraz, he would never risk calling unless he'd come across information that couldn't wait. The other option was that he'd come across information he didn't care to share with anyone but me. Including Bagheri. An option I didn't want to consider was that the Revolutionary Guard or National Security had discovered the professor's duplicity, and now they were trying to get a fix on my location.

I activated the GPS-drone app on my phone and answered after the fifth ring. The voice-recognition app was already up and running, so I said, “ID?”

“It's Fouraz.”

I didn't need the voice-recognition app. I knew his voice. Too bad he'd used his real name. Damn! “No more names. Do you hear?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“And your phone?”

“Prepaid. It goes in the trash after this call.” he said. The stress level in his voice was like a 7.0 on the Richter scale. I heard a slow, deep breath and realized he was thinking about how to convey his message. “The dance has started. Three days ago. I just heard.”

I got it. He was telling me that Ahmadinejad had started to deploy the Sejil-2 missiles from Natanz. That explained the seven missiles I couldn't account for during my unauthorized tour inside the facility. “How?”

“Wearing the most beautiful gowns you've ever seen.” So they'd camouflaged the missile transporters and slipped them in with routine truck convoys; this was a guess, but an educated one. Did that also mean that the launch locations had been surveyed and prepped? I had to find out, so I said, “Does that mean the ballroom locations have been chosen.”

“Not necessarily,” Fouraz said. “They'll make that decision as late in the day as possible.”

He was right about that. All we could do was to get a full satellite scan up and running, and I knew that had already been done. “Do what you can to get me that list, will you?”

“I'm using every resource I have,” he said.

He severed the connection. I stared down at the phone for a good five seconds before putting in a videoconference call to General Rutledge. The local time was 8:42
P.M.
; it was seven hours earlier in D.C.

From the shoulders up, it looked like the general had donned his dress uniform. I could see three silver stars glittering on each shoulder. He said, “Got your latest. Nasty. I'm on my way for a sit-down with Socrates.” He meant White House Chief of Staff Fry.

“Good. Because I've got more. It's gotten worse.” I told Rutledge in the most cryptic way about the deployment of the Sejil-2 missiles.

Rutledge's eyes shifted like the news had pushed him off-balance. “You sure? No one has seen a thing on our end. There's been no suspicious movement.
Nada.
”

“Then I suggest they go back and review the history books.” I hoped that he understood that I meant every standard truck convoy that had gone out of Natanz in the last three days. I could hear the agitation in my voice and decided this was a pretty damn good time for it. “Not the best time in the world to start underestimating a bunch of lowlifes who have been pulling our chain for three decades.”

“Agree,” he said. “On it.”

I guess that was Tom's way of saying,
I'll take boots-on-the-ground intel over eyes-in-the-sky any day, but I just need a reminder every once in a while.
Fine. I'm your guy, Tom.

I saved him the trouble of asking about the launch sites by saying, “No word from Bluebird yet, but I didn't expect it.”

“No, it'll be a game-time decision.” My old friend glanced off camera. I could see the set of his jaw and the tension stretching the worry lines around his eyes. He looked back at me. “Any news on your subterranean friend?” He was talking about our traitor.

“Yeah. He's close.” I didn't tell him about the incident at the Grand Bazaar. The guy had enough on his mind. “But we've got a few tricks up our sleeve on this end, too.”

“Stay frosty, my friend.”

“Roger that.”

He closed the connection. I stared at the iPhone screen. I had heard the frustration in Tom's voice. Nervous. That wasn't like him, but then he'd put all his eggs in one basket, and I just happened to be that basket. I knew one thing: black ops was an inexact science. You could plan, but the only thing you could count on was the plan's changing. You could force intel only so far. If you pushed too hard, the whole operation could go south in the blink of an eye. The mission was 90 percent in the bag. But it was the last 10 percent that could spell the difference between life and death for some kid in Tel Aviv.