The Natanz Directive (24 page)

Charlie's cell phone chimed, and he looked at the message appearing on the screen. “We're good,” he said.

He and I went inside. The air was warm and smelled of strong coffee and scented tobacco.

To the right, five men sat around a hookah, sucking on the mouthpieces, blowing smoke, gossiping in low voices. Two were dressed in long robes. The other three wore Western clothes. When they weren't talking, they were texting. What the hell had the world come to? Two couples, both middle-aged, and drinking from stubby, widemouthed coffee mugs, sat at tables near the window. On the left, a pair of men in dark sport coats sat opposite each other in a booth.

One faced the door. Round face. Dark complexion. Thick mustache. Heavy gold chain peeking from the open collar of a striped shirt. Eyes that took in everything. Fiftyish.

“Yousef Bagheri,” Charlie whispered.

Bagheri saw us, gave a nod, and mumbled to his table companion. The other man turned toward us. He was older—in his earlier sixties if not more—grayer, and far more weather-beaten. Clean-shaven. Deep creases alongside his mouth and down the center of his brow. It wasn't hard to guess that this was Professor James Fouraz.

Charlie exchanged a brief nod with the MEK man as we approached. We stopped in front of the table, and introductions were made in low, cautious voices. Charlie used the name on my French passport, calling me Richard Moreau.

Persians are big on shaking hands, and I obliged both men. I kept it formal. “Professor Fouraz. Mr. Bagheri. Good to meet you both.”

“Are you armed, Mr. Moreau?” Bagheri asked.

If a man asks, you tell him. “Walther.” I gave him a peek under my jacket. I nodded to Charlie. “Beretta. We're not expecting to use them. Mind if we sit?”

“Of course,” Bagheri said. I eased in next to him. I wanted a clear view of the door, just like he did. Bagheri was a hefty, muscular man and his power was as evident as his caution. I approved.

Charlie settled beside Fouraz, but the old man looked only at me, his eyes unblinking.

“You're American,” Fouraz said in English.

“Does it matter who or what I am? I understand you have information that I need.” I pulled an envelope from my pocket and laid it on the table. Ten grand in euros.

Fouraz pushed the envelope back with a trembling, clawlike hand. His fingers were gnarled, and his knuckles were misshapen. The fingernails were missing from his index and middle fingers.

“This is not about money.” He lifted his hand and straightened his fingers as best he could. “I'm doing this to keep Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from doing to my country what he's done to me.”

A convincing answer.
I took the envelope and slid it back into my coat pocket. “No insult intended, Professor,” I said to the man.

Fouraz dropped his hands to his lap. He lifted a square manila envelope that he struggled to open. He dumped a stack of photographs onto the table and pulled one free. It showed a convoy of cargo trucks. “That's a shipment of yellow cake uranium for the processing plant in Qom.”

I said, “Looks like trucks to me.”

Fouraz didn't bother to respond to that. He shared more photos. One was of a flatbed trailer with a cylindrical object as long as a telephone pole and as wide as a garbage can. “This is the upper stage of a Sejil-2 ballistic missile.”

His comment plucked at my nerves. The Sejil-2 could reach Israel, all of the Middle East, and most of Europe. Fit it with a nuke and it's hello Armageddon.

“What's the yield of one of these Sejil-2 warheads?” I asked.

“Twenty kilotons. The Hiroshima bomb was sixteen kilotons,” Fouraz answered somberly. “And sixty thousand people perished immediately. To comprehend the destruction, draw a circle with a radius of one and a half kilometers over any city and imagine that area flattened to ash and rubble.”

I glanced across the table at Charlie; the color had been bleached from his face, and he was shaking his head like a dying man wishing he'd said
I love you
to his kids more often. “Where and when was this photo taken?” I asked the professor.

“On the highway to Natanz. Six days ago.”

“Who took it?”

“Enemies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his murderous plans,” was how he answered.

Bagheri leaned toward me. “It's a race. You against Ahmadinejad. He wins, and the world loses.”

 

CHAPTER 17

TEHRAN—DAY 8

I used my iPhone to replicate the photos Professor James Fouraz had given me and stored them in a file marked “Recipes.” I e-mailed the file in full to one of a half-dozen untraceable e-mail addresses that only Mr. Elliot had access to. The photos provided exactly the kind of pieces I needed to fill in the puzzle of Iran's secret nuclear weapons program: shipments of yellow cake uranium to Qom and the delivery of a long-range ballistic missile to Natanz. Huge. That's what intel was: first you unearth the puzzle pieces, then you put the pieces together so the naysayers don't have a leg to stand on when the bombs start to drop.

The clock ticking in my head just got a little faster. The photos were priceless, but they had to be substantiated. Time for boots on the ground in Qom and Natanz.

“Anything else?” I asked. Professor Fouraz had already written his death warrant. He wasn't going to hold anything back now. I could see it on his face.

“An audio link,” he said. He held up a BlackBerry Curve, a generation old but still powerful. “Everything I know on one tape. If you could share an e-mail address, please.”

Now it was time for a demonstration of good faith on my part. I gave him another of my untraceable e-mail addresses and then my assurance. “Only two people have access to it. Me and a man who'll know exactly what to do with it.”

“It cannot be made public until the professor is safely out of the country,” Yousef Bagheri said, pinning me with his dark eyes.

“You have my word.”

“And mine,” Charlie said. I was glad he chimed in. I could see that the MEK chief respected Charlie. They had probably done business a hundred times. When you're a renegade trying to fund an outlaw political organization, you naturally do business with a renegade who has the connections to do so.

Professor Fouraz collected his photos. “I should have more soon,” he said. “People are coming out of the woodwork.”

“Very good,” I replied.

Yousef Bagheri placed his hands on the table. “If there is nothing else, then I'll ask you to keep me abreast of your plans, Mr. Moreau.”

“I'd like nothing better. Only one small problem, Mr. Bagheri.” Now it was my time to pin him with my eyes. He held them without blinking as I described the evidence suggesting a traitor in his operation. I gave him credit for that. I could also see his teeth grinding and the worry lines stretching out around his eyes.

“We're working it twenty-four/seven from our end.” I tipped my head in Charlie's direction. “I want you working it twenty-four/seven on your end.”

Bagheri grimaced. It was like someone had just sucker punched him. Eventually, he made a brisk gesture that might have been taken for a nod. “I won't sleep till he's found.”

He reached out his hand to me. I shook it. Not that I was dying to shake the man's hand, but I had learned one thing in my years of running black ops: never alienate a potential ally, and never make an enemy unless it helps your cause.

I shook the professor's for the same reason. It wasn't about gratitude. I would use him until he had nothing left to give. And then I'd push to the edge and squeeze him one last time just to be sure he didn't have anything left to give.

I slid out of the booth, and Charlie followed. “Be in touch,” he said to the MEK boss. He gave Fouraz a respectful nod. And then we were gone.

Charlie and I returned to Tehran and bunked in a new safe house in the Pamenar district, where the mix of old European architecture and corner markets gave you a feeling of prosperity that might or might not have been reality. Our rooms were on the second floor of an apartment house that looked like it had been transported from Paris. I half expected to see the Seine rolling slowly past when I pushed aside the curtain and glanced out. Instead, I saw an empty street that should have been alive with couples strolling hand-in-hand and street café's serving espressos and lattes.

One of Charlie's guys had left food and bottled water on the table. I cracked the water and drank half of it down. The food could wait.

I took out my iPhone. First, I sent Mr. Elliot a text:
Lazy day river, two-on-two.
“Lazy day river” was code for the Yahoo e-mail account that I'd shipped Professor Fouraz's pictures to. “Two-on-two” told him to look for a second e-mail with the audio link that Fouraz had forwarded. Then I sent the entire package on to General Tom Rutledge as well, with a note that read:
Visiting day tomorrow.

The general would fast track the photos with the CIA's nuclear assessment team, and they would see exactly the same thing that I saw. Great stuff, but not enough to justify a military attack, no matter how smart the bombs or precise the strike. They would need two things: the exact status of the activities taking place in Qom and Natanz and specific attack coordinates that allowed for the most surgical strikes possible. Piece of cake.

I carried my food over to Charlie's room, and we ate in silence.

The one thing Charlie's guys had provided for him that they hadn't thought to give me was a bottle of brandy. He filled two glasses with two-finger measures, and we made a silent toast.

Charlie rolled the brandy around his glass and then held it under his nose. “Ah,” he said, his first word in twenty minutes. Then he drank. I wasn't quite so sophisticated in my approach, but that did nothing to diminish my appreciation for the drink as the warmth of it spread in my stomach.

“So?” he said after another minute. “What's the plan?”

My first instinct was to keep everything close to my chest. The closer, the less messy, and things had gotten plenty messy over the last week or so. On the other hand, I still needed Charlie, and so far he'd been there at every turn. I'd asked him for his trust, and he'd delivered.

“Visiting day tomorrow.” Same as my message to Rutledge.

“Qom,” he said simply.

“No choice.” I gave him a brief outline of my plans to infiltrate a facility that, by all evidence, was hidden beneath a high school housing a thousand students.

“A school. That's as fucked as it gets.” He unwound from his chair and stood up. He padded across the room to a teapot resting on top of a hot plate. He poured two cups. He handed one to me and said, “Let's talk strategy.”

“Qom is southwest some ninety miles. We set up shop outside the city.”

“I've got a place,” Charlie said.

“I go in a couple of hours after dark. Not so late as to pique anyone's interest, but not before things have settled down at the school.” I glanced at Charlie. “You're my backup.”

“Let's get a map in here.” Charlie buzzed one of the guys in his crew and told him to bring in a computer. “With a plug-in,” I heard him say.

In less than five minutes, we had a detailed map of Qom and the surrounding countryside up on the room's television screen. Charlie invited two of his team to join us. The first I had seen at the surveillance site this morning, the stubby guy with the bow tie. “You remember Amur.” We nodded.

The other was a woman who couldn't have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six by my estimate. She was intense, sinewy, and tight-lipped. She wore canvas-colored cargo pants and an olive tank top. Captivating. She had
soldier
written all over her. “This is Jeri,” was all Charlie said. “She's our eyes and ears from Qom. Runs my operation there.”

We shook hands. Jeri settled in front of the map.

She pointed to a village on the outskirts of the city. “Seyfabad. We have a warehouse there with transportation and supplies. Your Russian delivery is already there.”

“Excellent. Thanks.”

“You have a French passport, yes?”

“I'm a tourist with a thirty-day visa.” I opened my coat and extracted Richard Moreau's passport. I held it out.

She studied it like someone who had needed similar false credentials. “Good. Very good. There are a dozen French companies in Qom and who knows how many French scholars at the university. We also get a steady stream of French tourists.”

“They're some of my best customers,” Charlie said with a proud grin.

“Of course they are. Cheap bastards,” I said, matching his grin.

Jeri handed back the passport. “ETD?”

I glanced back at the map illuminated on the television screen and said, “We'll leave in the morning, first light. I need some sleep. And we don't want to be on the road in the middle of the night. Too obvious.”

“Agree,” Charlie said.

We were on the road at 7:07
A.M.
according to my watch. Jeri drove and seemed perturbed by our late departure. I took this as a good sign and apologized. She glanced at me in the rearview mirror and nodded.

She handed Charlie a manila envelope and said, “Photos of the school from twenty-two different angles. If there's a full-blown uranium enrichment facility somewhere in the area, they're doing a great job of concealing it.”

Charlie sat in the front seat, smoking a black cigarette. Jeri kept the window cracked. We had traded the Honda for a Jeep Cherokee, and I was spread out in back with my backpack. Charlie's computer guy had forwarded a file containing the photos of the school, a blueprint of the interior, and a detailed street map of the area surrounding the school to my iPhone. I had added these to the aerial photos that the NSA had provided me.

“I thought you might want to see the originals,” Jeri said of the photos.