The Natanz Directive (37 page)

I was liking how this guy handled himself. When I approached, he went through the same routine. A smile, a nominal gesture in the direction of the van, a polite invitation in surprisingly polished English: “You would like a ride to the airport, sir?”

We made eye contact. I studied his face for less than a second and drew on thirty years of stress-recognition training. Tension, but not anxiety. Focus, but not trepidation. Good. “That would be nice. But I can only pay in rials.”

“Rials are fine.” He opened the passenger-side door. “Please. Get in.”

I climbed aboard. Duct tape crisscrossed the cracked and tattered vinyl seats. Ragged holes dotted the rusted floor panels. A slab of plywood had replaced the window behind my left shoulder. The rearview mirror was a small bathroom vanity mirror wired to the ceiling post. I settled onto the seat, and a spring dug into my ass. Apparently nothing was too good for an American with rials to spend.

“Nice ride,” I said. “What took you so long?”

“Our guy's on the run,” the man in black said from the backseat. “We finally got a fix. He's headed for a warehouse in the Old City.”

I nodded. He wasn't lying. I said, “You guys got names?”

“I'm Giv. Your driver's Zand.”

Zand was probably about thirty, but the graying temples added ten years. And the exaggerated worry lines that creased his forehead and branched out around his eyes added another ten. He held out his hand. It was the hand of a laborer. His grip was aggressive and sure.

He shifted the van into gear, and we rumbled from the curb.

Giv pointed to a bundle wrapped in canvas by my feet. I bent down and flipped a corner of the canvas aside. A pair of Russian AK-47s with the tubular stocks folded against the receivers stared back me. The MEK didn't care where their armament came from. Carrying a Russian rifle had no bearing on their loyalty, any more than carrying a German handgun or a Swiss blade. The MEK was loyal to only one cause, and that was their own.

“Insurance once we get to our destination,” Giv said.

I wanted to say that if AK-47s were necessary in the next hour, odds were very high that we were all dead and that the mission had fallen short.

Giv fell silent. He watched the traffic behind us like a man expecting the worst. He watched the people on the walks as if everyone of them had it in for us. Zand concentrated on the road, a hand on the wheel, a hand on the gearshift. I powered up my phone and texted an update to Rutledge, this one more detailed than the last. I used the most basic tradecraft lingo to tell him where I was going and why and what I would do the minute I had the launch sites for twenty-one Sejil-2 missiles, each capable of delivering a nuclear weapon twelve hundred miles with accuracy.

I pressed the Send button. I looked up from the phone and glanced across the seat at Zand. “How'd you two rate this assignment?” I asked.

Zand gave me the benefit of a mild shrug. “Mr. Bagheri has seven daughters and six sons-in-law. We're two of the six. We'd die for him. Which means we'll die getting you where you're going if we have to.”

He cast a glance my way. I answered with a short nod and bit of sarcasm. “Seven daughters. That must have made life interesting.”

Giv didn't get my humor. He said, “He wants them to know what a free Iran feels like.”

“I don't blame him.”

We drove north three more blocks. Then we turned west onto Enghelab Street. A small white Mercedes coupe came south on Felestin Street and accelerated around the corner. The car lunged after us like a dog chasing a rabbit.

“Zand.” Giv nodded toward the rearview.

Zand glanced into the mirror and shook his head, pissed, but not panicked.

Red lights flashed inside the grille of the coupe.

Giv cursed,
“Polise.”

The Walther was in my hand even before the word left his mouth. My heart rate jumped three beats a minute. Music filled my head. George Thorogood. “Bad to the Bone.” Fighting music.

 

CHAPTER 27

Giv reached out and gripped my shoulder. “City police. Not black beards,” he said.

That was the Revolutionary Guards' trademark: their black beards. Well, their black beards, their patented scowls, their battle gear—anything that heightened the fear. I saw the white Mercedes closing in on our rear bumper, lights flashing. The Revolutionary Guards I had seen outside Leila's place drove the bulkier, more ominous-looking Toyota HiLux.

“Let's see what they want. We run or put up a fight, we got no chance of making our rendezvous.”

“Yeah, and if they haul us in, we have even less chance of making our rendezvous,” I said. I glanced at the AK-47s wrapped in the canvas by my feet. Okay, so if it did come down to a fight, at least we had the firepower to make it interesting.

“Please put your gun away, Mr. Moreau,” the man at the wheel said. He was already rolling down his window. “They may have recognized our van.”

“What's that mean?”

He glanced at me. His expression only reinforced that I clearly had not had time to grasp the unwritten rules that governed the underground in a city run by fanatics. He said, “The Guards we cannot buy off. We don't even try. It's the next best thing to signing your own death warrant. The police, they are a different story. Most loathe the current regime. Most have families.”

Zand eased the van up to the curb and rolled to a stop.

Have at least two contingencies, Mr. Elliot used to say. Contingency number one: a viable escape route. I spent three seconds building a visual map of the neighborhood. There were small shops and apartments jammed together on either side of the street. But there was a florist on the immediate right, with the front door propped open with a plastic bucket that held fresh bouquets. Assuming the florist had an exit onto the alley—nobody likes assumptions, but this seemed like a pretty safe one—I could be out in the alley in ten seconds and improvising my next step. Contingency number two: incapacitate the police, relieve them of their weapons, and trade the van for their police car. I liked this one better, though I didn't know if Giv and Zand were up to it.

The Mercedes halted behind us. The frantic rhythm of its red emergency lights screamed danger. I watched in the van's side mirror.

The driver got out. He adjusted his uniform and hitched up his pistol belt; in other words, he could have been any out-of-shape cop in any city in the world. He walked toward the left side of the van while his partner stayed behind in the sedan. Zand waited, his gaze shifting from the rearview to the outside mirror. He prepared himself with a deep breath.

By this time, I'd decided on contingency number one if things went bad. If push came to shove, the cop approaching Zand's window would get the first bullet. I'd roll out the passenger-side door, drill the other one with a couple of shots through the windshield, and sprint into the florist. It wasn't a great plan.

I scoped the area, looking for unmarked cars or suspicious figures among the pedestrians. I saw none. So, if it was a trap, it was a well-disguised one. If the Revolutionary Guards were onto me, they would never send just one squad car. They'd send two dozen commandos. That was how they operated.

The cop sauntered up to the window. He peeked in, his dark, pointed face charged by an elongated nose and a poorly trimmed mustache. Sunglasses covered his eyes, even though the sun had long since hidden itself along the western horizon. He eased an elbow onto the doorframe and smiled the kind of smile that a banker shares with a customer seeking an embarrassingly high-interest loan.

He and Zand exchanged greetings in relaxed Farsi, and I had to wonder what the hell was going on. He glanced into the back at Giv. He said, “Pleasant day, no, Giv?”

“Not a bad day, Farid,” Giv replied.

Very chummy. If this cop was after me, he did a great job of hiding his jitters.

Farid looked at me now. He lifted his sunglasses. His brow cinched and the edges of his mouth quirked. His gaze traveled to the canvas bundle on the floor and returned to me with an amused grin.

I smiled. It wasn't a particularly friendly smile because I was also calculating the geometry necessary to plant a 9 mm slug in his forehead.

Giv coughed, loudly and deliberately. I saw him turn a palm up at the cop. He said, “What do you want, Farid?”

The cop turned from me and replaced his sunglasses. “I was getting worried you had forgotten me.”

“We've been busy. What do you need?”

“What I always need.” The cop rubbed his fingertips together. This wasn't about me after all. It was about his regular shakedown. Yeah, I was relieved, but a guy on the take was no better than a cockroach on the sidewalk. Both deserved to be squashed. Maybe I'd shoot him just on principle alone. His grin widened. “Could be your boss' warehouse is overdue for an inspection. What do you think?”

It was no secret that the MEK smuggled contraband in from Europe and the Far East. They were one of Charlie's biggest competitors.

“Can't have that, can we?” Giv said. He reached into his coat and retrieved his wallet. He counted out all the bills that he had, euros, not rials. He held it out. “I'm short. You're not gonna make an issue out of it, I hope.”

Farid gestured for the money. Giv reached across Zand's chest and gave it to him. Counted it. Then grinned. “Nah, this'll hold you till next week.” He slapped the money against the doorframe and turned back to his car.

“Baksheesh,”
Giv said to me. “Protection money.”

“Yeah, I got it,” I said. The question was, did I believe it? This op was so full of smoke and misdirection that an elaborate double cross would not have surprised me.

The three of us were watching as Farid got back inside the Mercedes. The windshield threw shadows across his face, but there was no mistaking the smirk as he showed off the payout to his partner. The emergency lights stopped flashing.

Zand put the van in gear. We lurched away from the curb and back into traffic. If I hadn't been so exhausted, I probably would have burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of what had just happened. On balance, we'd just lost ten minutes, and I wasn't sure we had ten minutes to lose.

I felt my iPhone vibrate. An incoming message from General Tom Rutledge read:
Need to talk.

“Problem?” Zand misread the expression on my face.

“I need two minutes,” I said to him. “Find a place to stop.”

Zand swung onto a side street and pulled up next to small, neighborhood park. Before I climbed out, I looked back at Giv. “Check with your boss. Make sure we're on schedule.”

Then I glanced at our driver. “Keep the engine running.”

I connected an earpiece to the phone and put some space between myself and the van. I stopped under a shaggy plain tree, engaged the secure-call app, and called General Rutledge's number.

On the second ring, he answered, his voice brusque and strained. “I know you're on the move, but I wanted you to know what we know.”

“Go.”

“You were right,” he said, and then confirmed that everything I'd sent him since day one had been verified, including the fact that satellite recon and sources on the ground had established that all twenty-one Sejil-2 missiles were on the move.

So, Professor Fouraz's information had been spot on. “Okay. What else?”

“Listeners picked up chatter bouncing between major players”—meaning all branches of the Iranian military—“which means the clock is seriously ticking.”

I wanted to say,
It's been seriously ticking for the last eleven days, General,
but I didn't. Instead, I said, “It's showtime. What else?”

“Ever since we got your note about The Twelver's pond, we've been keeping tabs on the area,” Tom said. “And there's been an increase in traffic there, just like Bluebird said there would be.”

The Toad's pond: Tare Ankaboot. The secret facility where Ahmadinejad and the mullahs were set to ride out a nuclear exchange. “The Toad and his friends are on the move. Chickenshit bastards,” I said. “How much time do we have?”

“Safe to say that the margin of error between success and catastrophe is thinner than thin,” he said. “Yoda has ordered Big George.”

So the president had set the wheels in motion on Tom's attack plan. And it went without saying that if we missed the window to hit the launch sites, any number of the Sejil-2 nukes would get away. I ran their target cities through my head: Tel Aviv. Rome. Vienna. Istanbul. Athens. Nuremberg.

“ETA on the party?” In other words, when would our bombers be in the air?

“Six hours.”

“What's my data exchange?”

“We've got a link that will route you through the listeners and right to the eagles and owls,” he said. “Hey, do me favor, will you? Try not to cut it too close.” He hung up.

Six hours. So I had provided enough intel to set a preemptive operation in motion, but not the most important piece of the puzzle, the one that could save how many millions of lives?
Well done, Jake.
I shook my head in disgust.
Get your ass moving.

I jogged back to the van, threw open the door, and jumped in. “How we doing?” I said to Giv.

“We've got our coordinates. A warehouse on the edge of the Pameran district. We're fifteen minutes away.” He showed me a map as Zand urged the van forward. “We have to come at it from the south. Across the railroad tracks from the public market and over this bridge.”

He jabbed a finger at the map. A two-lane bridge ran parallel to a footbridge spanning a river that apparently wasn't large enough to warrant a name, at least not on Giv's map. I didn't like the bottleneck created by the bridges, but the next crossing was a half mile east.

“How well do you know this guy we're meeting?” I asked.