The Twelfth Imam (19 page)

41

Hamadan, Iran

It had rained most of the night.

But it wasn’t the storm that had kept Najjar awake, and even though the downpour had now stopped, he knew this would be another sleepless night.

He slipped out of bed, threw on some casual clothes and a jacket, and went out for a walk. The streets—abandoned and quiet—were slick, the air damp and brisk. A low fog had moved in across the city. Najjar zipped up his jacket and shoved his hands in his pockets to keep them warm. As he walked, he tried to reconstruct all that had brought him to this point.

He had been recruited by Dr. Mohammed Saddaji to come to Iran with three specific goals in mind, his marriage to Sheyda notwithstanding.

First, he was to serve as his father-in-law’s right-hand man at the Hamadan research facility. It had been an honor to help one of the world’s most gifted physicists create a civilian nuclear power industry for Iran that would be the envy of the world and a rebuke to her critics, especially the Americans and the Zionists.

Second, he was to serve as the primary liaison between Dr. Saddaji and the team of physicists working in the city of Bushehr to bring Iran’s first nuclear power plant online safely and efficiently. A man of Saddaji’s intellect and importance could not be bothered, after all, with constant phone calls, e-mails, and other interruptions from the Bushehr reactor. He needed someone to manage all of that, and for this he trusted Najjar implicitly. It was the combination of these two roles that had been so attractive from the beginning and that gave Najjar a level of intellectual stimulation and professional satisfaction he deeply appreciated.

But there was a third role for Najjar, and Dr. Saddaji had strongly implied that over the long term this would be his most important mission: to help train up a new generation of Iranian nuclear scientists by eventually—within the next few years—teaching at one of the country’s premier research universities. This was Najjar’s true passion. He longed to move Sheyda and their newborn daughter away from Hamadan, buy a home, and carve out a more stable life for his family. He knew he had to pay his dues, and paying his dues meant serving his father-in-law faithfully, but now he was beginning to question everything.

A lone car drove past, splashing water onto the sidewalks. Najjar ducked out of the way just in time, then turned down a side street and picked up the pace. The more he thought about it, the more trouble he was having with the notion that a UD3 expert had been operating inside a civilian nuclear research compound. It wasn’t just that the man was an Arab, though that was bad enough. The real concern was that the
Times
of London had published a highly controversial story in December 2009 alleging that Iran was engaged in trying to build a trigger for a nuclear bomb. The top-secret memo exposed in that article had been partly responsible for an international firestorm of criticism against the Iranian regime. It had caused the United Nations Security Council to consider imposing new economic sanctions against Iran. Normally Najjar and his colleagues had limited access to Western newspapers and the Internet due to their sensitive positions. Yet copies of this particular article—“Discovery of UD3 Raises Fears over Iran’s Nuclear Intentions”—had been passed around by Dr. Saddaji himself as “proof,” he’d said at the time, of a “Zionist campaign of lies and slander” against Iran’s “peaceful” nuclear program.

Najjar recalled a particular section from the article with crystal clarity.
“Independent experts have confirmed that the only possible use for UD3 is as a neutron source, the trigger to the chain reaction for a nuclear explosion. Criticall
y
, while other neutron sources have possible civilian uses, UD3 has only one application—to be the metaphorical match that lights a nuclear bomb.”

That was true, Najjar knew. What’s more, any test explosion using UD3 would leave behind traces that would certainly be regarded as proof that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. There was no way, he was sure, his father-in-law would take such a risk.

At the time, Najjar had fumed that the entire article was built on lies. The
Times
reporter had quoted a “Western intelligence source”—someone who had to be from the Israeli Mossad, Najjar was convinced. It was all a plot by the Jews to subjugate the Persian people under Western colonialism and imperialism. He had passionately echoed his father-in-law, not because it was the party line but rather because Najjar believed it to be true. As Dr. Saddaji’s chief of staff, he personally knew—or knew of and controlled the personnel files for—every single nuclear scientist in the country. All 1,449 of them. He had pored over their files. He had pored over their security clearance dossiers. He knew all of their supervisors and was in direct contact with many of them. So he knew for a fact that not one of them—
not a single one
—was a specialist in uranium deuteride
or
titanium deuteride.

Now what was he to think? Dr. Saddaji had been keeping secret from him—his own son-in-law—the presence of an Iraqi UD3 expert in the Iranian nuclear program. The man had then proceeded to order the brutal execution of that expert without a trial, without even a hearing.
Why?

What else was his father-in-law hiding? Was the man really running a civilian nuclear power program, as Najjar had thought from the beginning? Or was he actually spearheading a clandestine program to build a nuclear weapon, as the Americans and the Israelis claimed? It was beginning to look as if the latter was the case. If so, was this the real project for which Dr. Saddaji had recruited him, the one that would “change the course of history”? Was this actually the project that would “make way for the coming of the Promised One”?

42

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

It was late when “Reza Tabrizi” landed in Dubai.

He couldn’t wait to get to the hotel for a hot shower, a good meal, and a real bed. To maintain the fiction he had already set into motion, he traded phone numbers with Yasmeen, giving her his number in Munich, and headed toward passport control, reminding himself again and again that he was no longer David Shirazi. He was a successful German businessman of Iranian extraction. He wasn’t coming from Syracuse, but from a trade show in Chicago that had been a waste of time. He rarely went to the U.S., he reminded himself. Indeed, he disdained doing business with the Americans. They were too loud, too pushy, and too greedy, and there were far too many Jews. He repeated this to himself again and again. CIA protocols required him to have spent the transatlantic flight refreshing himself on his cover story and getting himself fully into his alias. But his mind had been elsewhere on the flight, and he was rapidly playing catch-up.

Fortunately, he cleared passport control without being asked any questions. At that moment, his first instinct was to call Marseille and explain the delay in getting back to her. But he couldn’t use his new Nokia cell phone. It was carefully monitored by his friends back at Langley, and this was not a call he wanted Jack Zalinsky or anyone else at NSA or the CIA to track. As he headed to baggage claim, he walked past banks of pay phones and was tempted to stop and use one of them. But this, he hoped, wasn’t going to be a quick call, and Eva was waiting for him beyond customs.

Eva Fischer.

The very name suddenly confused David. For starters, of course, Eva wasn’t even her real name. It was an alias. Neither she nor Zalinsky, he realized, had ever given him her real name. So who was she? Where was she really from? What was she really all about?

Twenty-four hours earlier, Eva had been consuming an awful lot of his thoughts. He’d been looking forward to going to Starbucks with her, to attending a week of briefings with her, to going into Tehran with her, to getting to know her better. He still was, but now it was complicated. How could he even consider a relationship with her if there was a possibility of reconnecting with Marseille? Then again, was that really a possibility? He hadn’t heard from Marseille in years. Who knew what she wanted to talk about? She could be engaged. She could be married. She could have children. And what was all that about church in her note? Had she become religious? Was that why she wanted him to go to church with her back in Syracuse? It made no sense, but then again . . .

“Mr. Tabrizi, Mr. Tabrizi, over here!”

It took a moment for David to hear the name and realize it was supposed to be
his
. He turned and saw Eva smiling and waving at him through the enormous crowd in the Dubai International terminal, all waiting for their loved ones just beyond the secure doors. His first thought was that despite being much more modestly dressed than back in Virginia, she looked great, sporting a beautiful green headscarf and a full-length brown dress that covered her legs and her arms. His second thought was that this looked like a woman preparing to head into Iran, not to Starbucks. Nevertheless, he smiled and waved back and was surprised to see her eyes light up with anticipation as they met his.

“Welcome to Dubai, Mr. Tabrizi,” she said, being careful not to shake his hand or have any physical contact whatsoever since they were neither married nor related.

“Thank you, Ms. Fischer. Please, call me Reza,” he replied.

“If you insist. And call me Eva,” she said. “How was your flight?”

He couldn’t begin to tell her. “Too long. But it’s good to finally be here. Do you have a car for me to go to the hotel?”

“Actually, I’m afraid we have a change of plans,” Eva explained, picking up her own suitcase and garment bag.

“What do you mean?”

“You got my text, right?” she asked, handing him his new itinerary. “We’re heading to Tehran.”

“When?”

“Next flight.”

Stunned, David read the paper in his hands. She wasn’t kidding. They were booked on Emirates Airlines flight 975, departing Dubai at 12:10 a.m. and landing in Tehran two hours and ten minutes later. He glanced at his watch. It was already 10:56 p.m. They had to move quickly.

“I don’t understand,” he said as he scooped up his own bags and followed Eva back into a security line. “What’s going on?”

“Last night, the Israelis launched more than four hundred warplanes at Greece in what looks like a massive test run for a strike against Iran,” Eva whispered.

“Four hundred?”
David whispered back. “That’s almost half their fleet.”

“Exactly. The Iranians are freaked out.”

“And that’s why we’re going in?”

“Not entirely.”

“Then what?”

“Abdol Esfahani’s office called. He wants to meet us for breakfast.”

Esfahani was a key executive at Iran Telecom and the point man for operationalizing the new contract with Munich Digital Systems. It wasn’t a meeting they could easily blow off, but David wasn’t convinced he and Eva were ready to go into Iran quite yet. Where was Zalinsky? How could he have signed off on such a rapid departure? They were supposed to work here in Dubai for the week. They were supposed to refine their plan, set clear goals, and establish contingencies in case things went wrong, as too often they did. But how much planning could Jack and Eva have actually done without him, given that all weekend she had been with . . . whom?

“So,” he asked casually, “how was Berlin?”

“Uh, great,” she said, hesitating ever so slightly. “But not nearly long enough, you know?”

With that, David realized Eva hadn’t actually been in Berlin. She had come straight to Dubai with Zalinsky. That was fine, of course. She was the boss. She didn’t answer to him. But how and when exactly was she supposed to fill him in on the plan she and Jack had cooked up? They certainly wouldn’t be free to talk on the flight in, and they’d be trailed by intelligence operatives from the minute they hit the ground in Tehran. This was too big of an operation to rush. The stakes were too high. But they were rushing into it anyway. Why?

And then his thoughts shifted to Marseille and his anxiety spiked again. He couldn’t exactly call her from Tehran.

43

Hamadan, Iran

Najjar got home around 2 a.m. and found the lights on.

Sheyda was asleep on the couch with their tiny daughter snuggled beside her. He slipped off his shoes, quietly set his keys on the kitchen table, put a blanket over his wife and child, and stared at them for a while. They looked so peaceful, so innocent. Did they have any idea of the evil rising around them?

He turned off the lights in the living room and kitchen and stepped into the spare bedroom he used for a home office and library. Switching on his desk lamp, he cleared off his cluttered desk and found a stack of books his father-in-law had lent him several months before but that he had been too busy to read. The one on the top was titled
The Awaited Saviour
. It was written by Baqir al-Sadr and Murtada Mutahhari, both Shia ayatollahs. Taking the volume in hand, Najjar turned to the prologue and began to read.

A figure more legendary than that of the Mahdi, the Awaited Saviour, has not been seen in the history of mankind. The threads of the world events have woven many a fine design in human life, but the pattern of the Mahdi stands high above every other pattern. He has been the vision of the visionaries in history. He has been the dream of all the dreamers of the world. For the ultimate salvation of mankind he is the Pole Star of hope on which the gaze of humanity is fixed. The Qur’anic prophecy of the inevitable victory of Islam will be realized following the advent of the Mahdi, who will fight the wrong, remedy the evils, and establish a world order based on the Islamic teachings of justice and virtue. Thereafter there will be only one religion and one government in the world.

Najjar continued reading throughout the night. The more he read, the more convinced he became that the arrival of the Twelfth Imam and establishment of his caliphate, or kingdom, was imminent. Were not the signs, described by Shia sages throughout the centuries, coming to pass day by day? The world was becoming more and more corrupt. The global economy was in collapse. A great war was being fought between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The land of Taliqan—an ancient name for a region of Afghanistan—was consumed by war and poverty. Terrible earthquakes were occurring in ever-increasing number and intensity. Apostasy was spreading within Islam. Civil wars and uprisings were prevalent.

Najjar was electrified when he read, “The Mahdi is alive. He visits different places and takes an intelligent interest in world events. He often attends the assemblies of the faithful but does not disclose his true identity. He will reappear on the appointed day, and then he will fight against the forces of evil, lead a world revolution, and set up a new world order based on justice, righteousness, and virtue.”

To the very core of his being, Najjar believed these words to be true. He was absolutely convinced that he had seen the Promised One at least twice in his life, first as a child on the day Ayatollah Khomeini had died, and again in Baghdad the day he saw the Iraqi nuclear scientist kidnapped and his family gunned down in the streets. Najjar had prayed every day since that he would have the opportunity to see the Promised One again. But he had never dared tell anyone of his encounters, not even Sheyda, whom he loved more than life. He feared she would think he was boasting or lying or hallucinating or crazy.

But was it really necessary to prepare the way for the Twelfth Imam by building a nuclear weapon, by annihilating Israel and the United States and other enemies of Islam? Dr. Saddaji obviously believed it was. Najjar, too, had once believed that, but now he wasn’t so sure. Worse, he now feared that by authorizing the beheading of a man who had been forced into the Iranian nuclear program years earlier—a man whose wife and child Najjar himself had seen murdered—Sheyda’s father had become part of the “forces of evil” whom the Promised One was coming to judge. It saddened and sickened him, but what could he do? He couldn’t tell Sheyda. It would shatter her. To whom, then, could he turn?