The Twelfth Imam (28 page)

61

The phone rang and wouldn’t stop.

Najjar’s fever was still 102. His head was pounding. He was in severe pain, and he had no intention of getting out of bed to find a phone. But the constant ringing was driving him crazy. The phone would ring eight or ten times, pause for a moment, then ring another eight or ten times, pause again, and repeat the cycle. Someone was desperately trying to get him, but he could barely move. Finally summoning every ounce of energy in his body, Najjar sat up and inched himself to the edge of the bed. The phone kept ringing. He stood, wrapped himself in one of the blankets from the bed, and crawled across the room to the phone sitting on Sheyda’s dresser.

“Hello?” he groaned, doing everything he could to suppress a wave of vomiting.

“Is this Najjar Malik?” said a voice at the other end.

“Yes.”

“You’re the son-in-law of Dr. Mohammed Saddaji?”

“Yes. Why? Who is this?”

“You’ve been warned,” the voice said in Farsi but with a curious foreign accent. “You’re next.”

The phone went dead.

Suddenly Najjar heard pounding on the apartment door. His head felt like it was in a vise grip constantly being tightened. The pounding at the door wasn’t helping. He forced himself up, stumbled down the hallway past the living room, and checked the peephole. It was a police officer. Not security from the research center and not the secret police. It appeared to be a municipal police officer, so Najjar undid the several locks and opened the door.

“Dr. Malik?” the officer asked.

“Yes, that’s me.”

“I’m afraid I have terrible news.”

“What?” Najjar asked, his knees growing weak.

“It’s about your father-in-law,” the officer said.

“Dr. Saddaji? What about him?”

“I’m afraid he has been killed.”

“
What?
How?”

“I know this will be hard to believe. . . .”

“Tell me.”

“At this point, until we complete our investigation, this cannot be repeated,” the officer continued.

“Just tell me, please.”

“Dr. Malik, I’m very sorry to be the one to tell you this, but I’m afraid your father-in-law was killed by a car bomb.”

Najjar staggered backward and had to grab a chair to keep his balance.
“My wife,”
he cried.
“She was with him. Is she okay? Dear Allah, please tell me she’s okay.”

“Physically, she’s fine,” the officer assured him.

“Where is she?”

“She was taken to the hospital to be treated for shock. If you’d like, I can take you to her.”

A surge of adrenaline coursed through Najjar’s frail body. Suddenly alert and significantly stronger than he had been a moment before, he hurried to his bedroom, dressed quickly, washed his face, brushed his teeth, and went out the door with the officer. Fifteen minutes later, the patrol car was taking a left on Mardom Street and pulling into Bouali Hospital. Najjar ran in and quickly found Sheyda and her mother, Farah, both looking small and lost.

A security detail from the research center was already there protecting the family and had set up a perimeter around the hospital.

The rest of the day was a blur of tears and police investigators and well-wishers and funeral details. According to tradition, the burial had to be completed by sundown, but there was no body, the officer told Najjar privately, away from Sheyda and Farah. Only a few parts had been found, along with some bits of clothing and shoes. Those, Najjar was told, would be gathered, put in a small box, and wrapped in a white shroud.

Soon Dr. Saddaji’s secretary arrived at the hospital and began helping Najjar e-mail and text family members, friends, and coworkers, informing them of the death and requesting their presence at the funeral. The head of Najjar’s protective detail had just one demand: for reasons of state security, there could be no mention of how Dr. Saddaji had died in any of their private conversations or public communications. Not now. Not at the funeral. Not unless the head of Iran’s nuclear power and research agency personally authorized it, and even then, Najjar was informed that Ali Faridzadeh would likely veto such an authorization.

The defense minister?
Najjar thought. Until recently, a mention of someone so high up on the food chain would have struck him as bizarre and out of place. But now the pieces of the puzzle were coming together. Najjar no longer had any doubt that his father-in-law had been one of the top nuclear-weapons scientists in Iran, and he had given his life in his ghastly pursuit of killing millions.

Had the Israelis taken him out? Had the Americans or the Iraqis? He would probably never know. But while he mourned on the outside, inside he felt a great sense of relief. This solved a lot of problems, he realized. Maybe this would set back the entire weapons program and forestall a war that otherwise was surely coming soon.

62

Munich, Germany

While he waited for the phones, David threw himself back into his work.

He grieved for his parents and for Marseille. But there was nothing he could do for any of them at the moment. He had to stop being David and get back to being Reza Tabrizi. He had to get himself ready to go back inside Iran, and that, he was convinced, meant becoming an expert on the Twelfth Imam.

Zalinsky had told him not to get sidetracked. But David couldn’t help himself. He simply could not go back into Iran without understanding better who this so-called Islamic messiah was and why people at the highest levels of the Iranian government seemed so focused on his appearance. Something was happening. Something dramatic and historic. Zalinsky didn’t get it. But David’s instincts told him this was real.

He went hunting for every scholarly work and serious analysis he could possibly find on the Internet, since his search of the database at Langley had turned up little of value. On the third day, David found himself poring over a study published by a Washington think tank in January 2008. It was a bit out-of-date, but it gave him an important context he certainly wasn’t getting from anyone at Langley.

Apocalyptic politics in Iran originates from the failure of the Islamic Republic’s initial vision. The 1979 Islamic Revolution began with a utopian promise to create heaven on earth through Islamic law and a theocratic government, but in the past decade, these promises ceased to attract the masses. Faced with this failure, the Islamic government has turned to an apocalyptic vision that brings hope to the oppressed and portrays itself as an antidote to immoral and irreligious behavior. This vision, which is regarded as a cure for individual and social disintegration, appears in a period when the Islamic Republic does not satisfy any strata of society, whether religious or secular.

David was intrigued by the notion that “when the Iranian government failed to deliver its promises, many Iranians looked for alternatives and found the cult of the Mahdi—the Messiah or the Hidden Imam—and its promise to establish a world government.” The number of people who claimed to be in direct connection to the Twelfth Imam or even to be the Mahdi himself, the author noted, had increased remarkably in recent years in both urban and rural regions.

That certainly rang true to David. His parents had spoken for years about how desperate Iranians were for a rescue from the failure of the Islamic Revolution of ’79. His father had always stressed the medical angle. Suicides in Iran, he said, were at an all-time high, not just among the young but among people of all ages. Drug abuse was a national epidemic, as was alcoholism. Prostitution and sex trafficking were also skyrocketing, even among the religious clerics.

Given that David’s mother was an educator at heart, she found it both terribly sad and deeply ironic that Iran’s high literacy rates and increasing access to satellite television and the Internet seemed to exacerbate people’s despair. Why? Because now, for the first time in fourteen centuries—and certainly for the first time since Khomeini had come to power—Iranians could see and hear and practically taste the intellectual, economic, and spiritual freedom and opportunity that people elsewhere in the world were experiencing. Starved, Iranians were desperately seeking such freedom and opportunity for themselves. Indeed, they were so desperate for hope that they were opening themselves up to the deception of thinking it might come from a bottle or a pill or a needle. Was believing in a false messiah just another coping mechanism? David wondered.

The monograph was written by an exiled Iranian journalist by the name of Mehdi Khalaji, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. As David continued reading, he was intrigued by Khalaji’s assertion that “the return of the Hidden Imam means the end of the clerical establishment, because the clerics consider themselves as the representatives of the Imam in his absence. Hence, they do not propagate the idea that the Hidden Imam will come soon.”

By contrast, Khalaji wrote, “in the military forces . . . apocalypticism has a very strong following.” He wrote that an influential group within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with responsibility over Iran’s nuclear program seemed particularly drawn to this fervor for the coming messiah.

That was what worried David most—not that everyone in Iran believed the Twelfth Imam was coming but that the country’s top political and military leaders, including those running the country’s nuclear weapons program, did.

That said, there was something in Khalaji’s assessment that did not ring true. Implicit in the article was the notion that Iran’s Supreme Leader was not a true believer in the soon coming of the Twelfth Imam but rather a shrewd political operator seeking to manipulate public opinion. Yet this certainly didn’t square with Daryush Rashidi’s or Abdol Esfahani’s description of the Supreme Leader. Perhaps Hosseini had once been a skeptic, but no longer. As far as David could tell, Hosseini and his inner circle now seemed to see their role as preparing the hearts and minds of the people—and the military—for the coming of the Twelfth Imam.

These beliefs seemed to be driving Iran’s nuclear weapons development to a feverish pace, and David wondered how he could persuade Zalinsky they weren’t a sideshow. Washington’s entire approach toward Iran thus far had been built on trying to engage Ayatollah Hosseini and President Darazi and their regime in direct negotiations while applying escalating economic sanctions and international isolation. It had worked with the Soviets, the Jackson administration argued. Ronald Reagan had engaged Gorbachev in direct negotiations, and the Cold War had ended without a nuclear war, indeed without a shot being fired between the United States and the Soviet Union. Now the administration wanted to take the same approach with the regime in Tehran. But they were wrong. Dead wrong. They were following the wrong historical model, and the results could be disastrous.

David opened a new document on his laptop and began drafting a memo to Zalinsky. He noted that Gorbachev—like all Soviet leaders of his time—was an atheist. Atheists, by definition, believed neither in God nor in an afterlife. So Reagan sought to persuade Gorbachev that any nuclear attack on the U.S. would result in the Gorbachev family’s personal annihilation—that Mikhail, his wife, Raisa, and their daughter, Irina, would personally die a horrible, grisly death, that they would be snuffed out like a candle and cease to exist, unable to take their power and money and toys with them. Reagan’s theory was that if he could convince Gorbachev that the U.S. policy of “mutual assured destruction” was real and viable, then he could persuade Gorbachev and the Soviet politburo to back off of their nuclear ambitions and truly negotiate for peace. It worked. Realizing there was no way the USSR could win a nuclear war with the technologically advanced West, Gorbachev launched a policy of
glasnost
(openness and transparency) and
perestroika
(restructuring). Eventually the Berlin Wall fell, Eastern Europe was liberated, and the Soviet Union itself unraveled and disintegrated.

By contrast, Hamid Hosseini was not Mikhail Gorbachev, David noted, typing furiously. Hosseini was not a Communist. He was not an atheist. He was a Shia Muslim. He believed in an afterlife. He believed that when he died, he was going to wind up in the arms of seventy-two virgins—not exactly a disincentive for death. Moreover, Hosseini was a Twelver. He was a member of an apocalyptic cult. The man wanted the Mahdi to come. He believed he had been chosen to help usher in the era of the Islamic messiah. He was convinced he needed to build nuclear weapons either to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization himself or to be able to give the Twelfth Imam the capacity to do it. How could the U.S. successfully negotiate with such a man? How could the West successfully deter or contain him? What could the president of the United States possibly offer or threaten that would persuade Hosseini to give up his feverish pursuit of nuclear weapons? For the Supreme Leader to negotiate with the U.S. would, in his mind, be tantamount to disobeying his messiah and being sentenced to an eternity in the lake of fire. Why didn’t Washington understand that? Why were they so consumed and distracted by other issues? Didn’t they understand the stakes?

David finished the memo, tagged Eva with a blind copy, hit Send, and immediately wondered if he had done the right thing.

Hamadan, Iran

Najjar needed to see Dr. Saddaji’s files.

He was drained and exhausted from the funeral. He was also still quite ill. He took Sheyda, Farah, and the baby back to the apartment and got them settled in for the night. His mother-in-law was still nearly inconsolable, and Sheyda didn’t want her to be all alone that night. But Najjar explained that he could not stay. He had to get back to the office, where Dr. Saddaji’s papers and personal effects had to be attended to and secured.

“Can’t all that be done tomorrow, Najjar?” Sheyda asked, imploring him to stay with his family.

No, it could not wait, he told her. But the truth was also that he did not want to be home just then. He did not feel remorse for his father-in-law’s death, and he didn’t have the capacity to fake it for much longer, certainly not in front of two women he truly loved. More importantly, he knew he had to get to Dr. Saddaji’s computer, break into it, and find out as much as he could. But Najjar said none of these things to his fragile wife. He simply kissed her and promised to drive safely and get home as quickly as he could.

Reluctantly she let him go, though not without more tears.

To his shock, however, when he got all the way to Dr. Saddaji’s office, he found it already heavily guarded by plant security. Boxes full of files were being removed by armed guards. Dr. Saddaji’s desktop computer had already been removed, along with his external hard drive. Najjar insisted that he be allowed to review his father-in-law’s files and possessions to ensure that the family got what was theirs, but he was quickly introduced to the deputy director of Iranian internal security and told he would simply have to wait.

“Dr. Malik, as you know, your father-in-law was a very powerful, very influential man,” said the intelligence official, who explained he had come from Tehran on direct orders from Defense Minister Faridzadeh. “He held many state secrets that the Zionists, the Americans, the British, and frankly all of our enemies would love to get their hands upon. I know you and your family are grieving. But please, give us a few days, and we will send to you everything that is rightfully yours.”

Najjar was offended and angry, but he lacked the energy and the will to argue with anyone. Not there. Not then. He was still reeling from the day’s events and weak from a fever he hadn’t shaken. He had eaten nothing all day. He had barely been able to keep down water; the doctor had had to give him shots because he kept vomiting up the antibiotics he was on.

He excused himself from the intelligence official, went to the men’s room, washed the perspiration off his face, and tried to figure out what to do next. He needed to know what Dr. Saddaji had been up to—not in theory but in fact. He needed proof. But he had none, and whatever shred of motivation he’d had to make it through the day was now gone.