The Natanz Directive (28 page)

But maintaining anonymity in Natanz was not as easy as it might have been in a larger city. Natanz, for all its notoriety, wasn't much more than a collection of settlements a half hour southeast of Kashan, and an hour northwest of Esfahan. It lay at the junction off Highway 7, and no more than forty thousand people called the place home. The Karkas Mountains formed a rugged, ten-thousand-foot background to the town and its collection of shrines and ruins. Besides the nuclear facility tucked in the mountains south of town, the one thing the people of Natanz liked to brag about was the inauspicious fact that Darius III was murdered there. I couldn't find a historian who agreed with them, but why put a damper on their one claim to fame.

I heard a brief knock on the door, and Charlie peeked his head in. He had what looked like a diplomatic pouch in his hand.

“A courier from MEK chief Yousef Bagheri just dropped this off,” he said, placing the unopened pouch in my hand. “It looks like Professor Fouraz came through for us.”

I realized I was holding my breath as I broke the seal on the pouch, which suggested a reliance on an outside source that made me very uncomfortable. There were three pieces of documentation inside. The first was a single sheet of typing paper with six numbers laid out in a series of three written on it:
43-6-120
. A short note read:
Natanz entry code.

The next thing the pouch revealed was an employee ID badge for the Natanz nuclear facility in the name of Avan Javaherian, complete with a magnetic strip and a photo: mine. Just as long as no one asked me to pronounce Avan Javaherian …

Charlie was right. The professor
had
come through. I let my breath out. At least this time I wouldn't be stowing away in the back of a semi loaded with concrete pipes and hoping the guards were too lazy to search them.

The last thing in the pouch was a delivery manifest for roofing tiles. I showed it to Charlie. “Leave it to me,” he said, just as my phone rang. “I'll give you some privacy.”

“Five minutes,” I said. When the door closed, I picked up. It was Mr. Elliot.

“Your cover's all set,” he said. His call was twelve minutes late, which was an eternity for my longtime case officer. I thought of chiding him, but detected a minor strain in his voice that convinced me otherwise. “I've arranged for you to join a group of Canadian archaeologists on their way to visit the Natanz ruins. But you've got to bus it. Their bus will be in Kashan in forty-five minutes. They've got a short stop at the
Ā
gh
ā
Bozorg Mosque. That's where you get onboard.”

“Nice,” I said.

“What's not so nice is that, unlike Qom, security in Natanz is obvious and omnipresent, my friend. Cloak and dagger will only get you so far.”

I told him about the security code and the employee ID, and a minute bit of tension drained from his voice. He said, “Okay. Good progress so far. Push, but don't press, right?”

I smiled. I hadn't heard that one in years. “Good advice,” I told him.

By the time I signed off, both Charlie and Jeri were back in the room. Jeri updated me on the lures she and our counterintelligence team were laying for the twenty-six remaining candidates for traitor-of-the-year honors. “We're using physical rendezvous points tomorrow night that we'll be monitoring, all in central Tehran. I'm using every spare man we have.”

“We'll have him within two days,” I said confidently. Then I told them my plans for entering Natanz posing as a French archaeologist.

“I like it,” Charlie said.

“But that doesn't account for my delivery into the Natanz facility, and it doesn't account for my other suitcase, Charlie.”

“Jeri's taken care of that,” he said, glancing her way.

Jeri used the computer to pull up a street map of Natanz and the access roads leading to the nuclear facility. She pointed to a warehouse district north of town and traced a route to a railroad siding. “Here. Look for a white pickup truck. A Daihatsu. Your luggage is already onboard.”

She forwarded the map to my cell phone and said, “Now if you just looked a little more French and a little more like an archaeologist.”

“And you're traveling too light. Looks suspicious,” Charlie said. He went to the closet and came back with a rolling carry-on. He stood the carry-on in front of me. “It's got some extra clothes of mine and some toiletries. Nothing you can't pitch if necessary.”

“And there's one thing missing,” I said.

“Like what?”

“If I know my Canadian counterparts as well as I think I do, I imagine they might get thirsty on the long road to Natanz. Helping them out might be the neighborly thing to do, don't you think?”

Jeri grinned; she had an amazing smile. Charlie waltzed over to the room's liquor cabinet—an impressive collection of imported spirits that reminded me that Charlie had his hands in every possible form of contraband—and returned with a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon.

“Perfect.” I packed the bottle in the carry-on and zipped it closed.

“One more thing,” he said, nodding to Jeri. “Show him.”

Jeri reached into her jacket pocket and withdrew a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife in a thin leather sheath. “A little added firepower,” she said.

“Apparently,” Charlie said, “an MI6 agent used this to settle a gambling debt. Said it once belonged to a British commando from World War Two. As the story goes, it drew plenty of Nazi blood over the course of the war. Sounds like a lot of value-added bullshit to me.”

I inspected the blade. It was sturdy, razor sharp, and perfectly designed for close-quarters combat. I fastened the knife and sheath around the inside of my left ankle, tucked it inside my sock, and hid it beneath the pant cuff. “Let's hope I don't need it.”

Charlie drove me to the
Ā
gh
ā
Bozorg Mosque. I presented my Canadian passport to the archaeological group's minder, a woman from the Ministry of Tourism and certainly a part-timer with National Security. The head of the group was a balding, stooped man who introduced himself as Dr. Jeffrey Carlyle from the University of Manitoba. He was clearly suspicious of the latecomer to his entourage and asked too many questions too quickly.

“Thanks for having me onboard,” was pretty much all I said as the minder herded all twenty-three of us—college professors, students, and a couple of amateurs—onto a very comfortable tourist bus.

I sat near the back. Dr. Carlyle took a seat across the aisle, where his game of stink eye continued. I didn't mind. I was more interested in the mounting evidence identifying the doctor as a day drinker: red nose, ravaged skin, spiderweb eyes.

Halfway to Natanz, I retrieved my carry-on from the overhead rack and unzipped the bag; I made sure our minder wasn't looking. The bottle of Knob Creek bourbon lay swaddled in T-shirts, and I made sure Carlyle got a glimpse of it.

“If you should get a little thirsty.” I gave him a nod. Not too subtle.

The doctor's gaze warmed. I guess he was easily impressed. He cleared his throat and whispered, “Splendid. Just the thing to cut the dust.”

Suddenly I was Dr. Carlyle's best friend, and we chatted Iranian history until our bus pulled into a roundabout out front of a modest, three-story hotel situated near the edge of town and just off the main road.

We checked in and were issued old-fashioned brass keys to a string of rooms on the second floor. Just before dinner, there was a rough knock on my door. It was Dr. Carlyle, all decked out in a tweed suit that fit his ruddy complex to a tee. He had a glass bottle in his hand that had once contained premade green tea and the brilliant idea of using the bottle to transport Knob Creek whiskey to dinner. I acted like a man who would never have conceived such a clever idea, and together we congregated with the rest of our group in the hotel's cramped, but tasteful restaurant.

“The only decent place for dinner in all Natanz,” our minder told us, as if the town was a disgrace to Iranian cuisine.

There were eight or ten other tables in the restaurant, all occupied, and all by foreigners from places far and wide: Russia, Germany, Japan, Sweden, France. As it turned out, Dr. Carlyle was not the only one who had arrived at dinner with a glass tea bottle in hand, and he was not the only one freshening drinks with the bottles' mysterious potions. After an hour, I understood why. The food was terrible. Some Knob Creek made it almost edible.

Dessert was being served when I saw him. He was passing through the lobby, a tall, rounded man with a trimmed beard and thick eyebrows. Atash Morshed, the online banker from Amsterdam. I nearly dropped my drink. Impossible. I took in details as fast as my mind would record them. Expensive suit and fancy shirt, but no tie, an omission that gave him an unkempt look. His eyes moved too quickly for a tourist. He looked too exhausted for a successful businessman.

He carried a large briefcase. The briefcase was identical to the one in the photo from the airport in Beijing. The briefcase was chained to his wrist. He stopped at the front desk and made a telephone call. His gaze skimmed the room and reached into the restaurant, hopscotching from person to person in suspicion. He exuded nervous tension like a rank smell, at least for someone with my experience. And my experience was giving very good odds that the Chinese circuit boards were in the briefcase.

Morshed said a few words into the phone, listened, and hung up. He checked his watch in a gesture that was equal parts impatience, discomfort, and distress.

I flexed my leg and felt the hilt of the F-S knife press against the inside of my calf.

The banker had two new items for his busy schedule.

One, he was going to lose that briefcase.

And two, he was going to die.

 

CHAPTER 20

NATANZ—DAY 8

The Iranian government had made Atash Morshed a wealthy man. They sold drugs in massive amounts, and he laundered their money using banking techniques that most bankers didn't know existed. He used the Internet. He covered his tracks by creating an online bank with thousands of legitimate customers. He funneled the money from Amsterdam back into Iran via the government's unmonitored Office of Business Development, and the OBD bankrolled nuclear energy development in places like Natanz and Qom.

It was hard to tell whether Morshed was on his way out of the hotel or waiting for someone's arrival. He wasn't very good at disguising his unease in any case, pacing the lobby floor with uneven strides and wandering eyes. I couldn't blame him: this was uncharted territory for a man more accustomed to penthouse suites in places like Geneva and Paris, a man more accustomed to gracing the business pages of the Amsterdam
Schuttevae
than to running errands for mullahs and demagogues.

When he turned suddenly toward the entrance, I rose from my chair. I was halfway up when Morshed pivoted at the door, did a complete about-face, and lurched down the hall to the elevators.

“Going someplace?” Dr. Carlyle asked me.

“I think I need some fresh air,” I said. “If you'll excuse me.”

Dr. Carlyle greeted this news with a hangdog expression that had far more to do with the bottle of bourbon up in my room than the sudden loss of a complete stranger's company. One part of me wanted to toss him my room key and say,
You need it a lot more than I do. Drink up.
A more prudent part of me wanted to keep the man at bay, so I said, “I won't be long. Maybe we can get a nightcap.”

“Excellent,” he said, as I lifted my hat from the back of the chair and moved away from the table, nodding with diminishing charm to the people at our table. I lengthened my stride when I reached the lobby, but by the time I got to the elevators, Morshed was already going up.

I hustled to a stairwell at the end of the hall. The black-glass ball of a security camera hung from the wall by the stairs, and I automatically pulled the brim of my cap down over my eyes. It didn't really matter. If someone wanted to know who the man bounding up the hotel stairs was in the middle of the dinner hour, there were twenty-three very high-strung Canadians who could probably have given them a fair description.

I took the steps two at a time to the second floor and peeked out the door in the direction of the elevators. No Morshed.

I lost a second huffing up to the third floor and a number on the door that looked like a hawk in flight. I put a crack in the door and scoped the hall. I heard a bell that signaled the arrival of the elevator. I heard the doors slide open. A man stepped into the hall. It was Atash Morshed. He turned to his left and walked away from the elevators with a quick, uncertain step. I watched his back for three seconds before stepping onto the floor.

Morshed veered to the left and down a second hallway. I knew the layout: it was identical to the second floor. I peeked around the corner and watched him. He was searching his pockets for a room key using his right hand while his left hand held firm to the briefcase. He stopped in front of a door halfway down the hall. Dropped his key. I heard an agitated growl as he bent down and retrieved it. It took him two tries to get the door unlocked, and he stormed inside.

I was moving down the hall when I heard the dead bolt click. A door chain rattled into place.

I yanked on a pair of thin leather gloves. I stopped at his door and listened. He must have gone straight for the telephone, because his muffled, agitated voice filtered through the door. Not a happy man, our Mr. Morshed. Well, what in the hell did he expect? Five seconds later, the telephone rattled in its cradle. Footsteps, like a man pacing. Water splashing in a basin. Silence.

I knocked softly. My Farsi sucked, but I managed, “Sir? Sir.”

“What is it?” he replied, angry and nervous. His Farsi was worse than mine.

I thought about switching to English, but how obvious would that have been. English, in a town like Natanz, in a country that despised Americans? I wanted to say something enticing like,
Your car's downstairs,
but couldn't find the words. All I managed was, “Car. Outside.”