The Natanz Directive (31 page)

I continued along the catwalk and found a niche between two vertical air ducts. I dug out my iPhone and surreptitiously engaged the recording app. I'd let the experts back home decipher the results.

I checked my watch. It had been nearly an hour since my arrival. I needed a way deeper into the complex. The catwalk farther on circled the room I was in, which made it a dead end. Trying to navigate the factory floor below would have been suicidal. There were maintenance ladders every hundred meters or so that traveled into the maze of ductwork along the ceiling, and I chanced a look through my digital telescope. I followed the nearest ladder up—the room's ceiling towered 150 feet into the air at least—and then traced the connecting skywalk to the far wall and a closed door.

Worth the risk.

It took thirty seconds to scale the ladder to the maintenance skywalk along the ceiling and another forty seconds to scurry along the skywalk to the door. I used the maintenance man's ID badge on the magnetic lock. It opened onto a second room, the convex shape of an airplane hangar only twice as large.

For the second time in two days, I'd struck gold.

Another centrifuge plant at least as large as the one in Qom. The tall, silver cylinders with their silver coils spiraling toward the ceiling looked like an army of clones awaiting their marching orders.

This was a place of serious business. The men and women monitoring the enrichment process looked like accountants and schoolteachers, not mad scientists with a mission of mass destruction. Everyone moved with purpose and calm, and, from what I could tell, I might have been the only one in this particular room with a weapon.

I ran my iPhone camera again on full zoom and stepped lightly along the skywalk. I knew I was already in way over my head, but intel was only as good as the pieces you put together into a cohesive whole. It might have been obvious to me what the hell was going on, but obvious wasn't what the politicians wanted. They wanted the entire picture. And since the guys I had to convince were politicians, that's what they were going to get. To hell with it.

I traveled through two more chambers before I found it. At first, I thought it was just another cavernous space laced with conveyor belts and roads and filled with cranes and trucks. But the security in this part of the plant was serious: guards in black uniforms with submachine guns stood at regular intervals.

I tracked the room grid by grid with the camera and froze when I saw the long, olive-green cylinders resting on the backs of seven flatbed trailers. Workers in blue overalls and technicians in white smocks climbed around the seven cylinders, busy as nursery ants tending their queen. In terms of size and shape, the cylinders mirrored those in the photos James Fouraz had shown me of Sejil-2 missiles, and I zoomed in to record as much detail as possible. The cap had been taken off the front end of each cylinder, exposing a concave circular plate with cable connectors and pipe fittings. I knew enough to understand that this was where the warhead and guidance system mated to the rocket.

All for nothing, right? After all, I had destroyed Morshed's circuit boards, and without them the Iranians were wasting their time. Well, I wasn't really convinced. That was far too easy and they could always buy more from the Chinese.

I crept farther along the catwalk. A twenty-foot-high white partition bisected the room, and the activity on the other side mirrored what I had just seen. There were workers and technicians fussing around seven more missiles.

One of the missiles seemed further along than the others: it had a conical device fitted to the front end. This had to be a nuclear reentry vehicle; I would have bet anything. Dozens of colored cables looped from the cone and the device inside to a battery of computers staffed by very serious technicians.

This had to be the nuke in the final phases of preparation. And there were six more cones waiting on trolleys next to their respective Sejil-2s.

I went into full evaluation mode, using rapid-identification techniques that had been ingrained in me over the last three decades and came to the conclusion that the men and women down there were acting as if these were live warheads. As badly as I wanted to believe that I had destroyed the critical electronic components that Morshed had been transporting into the country, the picture wasn't right.

All the intel I had collected indicated that the Iranians had twenty-one missiles. I had just accounted for fourteen of them. Okay, fine. Where the hell were the other seven?

I recorded as much as possible, then decided I should get the hell out while my luck was still holding. In case it didn't, I activated my iPhone to transmit the videos and photographs to General Rutledge. I don't know if I actually expected to get a satellite signal this far underground, but it didn't happen. Odd, but that made me more nervous than anything I had done in the last two hours. I took a deep breath and told myself to get a grip. Getting a grip really meant a steady, deep breath and driving my heart rate from seventy-six back to sixty-two. It took less than fifteen seconds but the pause still pissed me off.

The skywalk carried me back through four chambers and down to the catwalk in the first room. The catwalk and the tunnel merged again, and I jogged back to the rear entrance and outside. It was 3:36
A.M.
The air bit into my skin, and I realized I was sweating.

If you expect the worst, there's probably a reason. The first thing I saw was a squad of soldiers hustling along the fence. It didn't look like your normal, everyday perimeter watch. Maybe because they were jogging, and maybe because I could heard their voices all the way across the compound. It was probably a safe bet they were looking for their two missing guards. Too bad they couldn't ask me, because I really could have saved them a lot of time.

I had a decision to make. Did I trust my disguise and my newly acquired ID badge enough to use the old Daihatsu pickup truck I'd arrived in, or was that just asking for trouble? In either case, I needed my backpack, so I hurried across the compound to the door that led to the underground parking lot. I took the stairs two at a time and cut between three or four dozen cars to the parking space I had chosen more than two hours earlier. I was surprised how many cars had come and gone since I had ventured inside. For some reason, that didn't sit very well with me, and I decided against the truck.

I sidled up to the Daihatsu, keyed the lock, and reached casually inside. I hoisted my backpack. I went back up top.

I hadn't gone more than four or five strides when a man in overalls just like mine emerged from a side door of a detached, single-story office building on the far side of the lot. He had a courier bag slung over his back and was adjusting the neck strap of his helmet. He approached a Honda motorcycle and swung one leg over the seat.

There it was, my ticket out of Natanz.

The courier had the engine started and the headlight lit when he saw me coming. I raised my hand and called out to him like a long-lost friend, or at least a colleague in need of a helping hand or a cigarette. He eased back on the throttle and pointed to his helmet as if he hadn't heard me. He unsnapped the neck strap and lifted the helmet in two hands.

I smiled, said, “Good evening,” in my best Farsi, and clotheslined him. He fell backward, and the motorcycle clattered to the ground.

He rolled to his side with surprising speed and drew a pistol from a belt holster. I had made a mistake: this was no ordinary courier, and I should have seen that even before I'd started his way.

Now I had to kill him. I kicked the gun from his hand and aimed mine at his head. One quick shot between his eyes.

I holstered the Walther, grabbed the collar of his jacket, and dragged him behind the building. I put on his helmet, goggles, and gloves, and slipped the courier bag over the shoulder opposite my backpack.

I walked calmly back to the Honda and jumped aboard. I turned the ignition. I'd grown up riding motorcycles. My biggest problem was always an overwhelming urge to see whether a bike's speedometer was really accurate once you broke one hundred miles per hour. Of course, once you broke that mark, you didn't really care about the speedometer.

Not this time. I cruised along the asphalt lane toward the front gate of the complex at a crawl. I beeped the horn and flicked my high beams at the guards. I trusted my instinct that the guards were vigilant about keeping intruders out but not so vigilant keeping them in.

The security bar over the exit lane pivoted, and I scooted through. I goosed the throttle and headed back down the road toward Natanz. I reached the main highway and stopped long enough to access my iPhone, disarm the Russian suitcase bomb, and activate the device's self-destruct function. Then I turned north, toward Tehran. If I never saw Natanz again, it would be way too soon. Except maybe on the news, engulfed in the flames of a twenty-two-thousand-pound bunker buster.

I didn't stop until I got to Kashan. I parked the motorcycle a block from the safe house. It was still pitch dark outside and like a ghost town, so I used the alley. I jumped the fence into the backyard, followed a stone path through a rose garden waiting for spring to come, and stopped at the back door. I peered in. If Charlie and Jeri were still there, they were sitting in the dark.

I knocked softly. Knocked again. Jeri was all of a sudden standing behind me.

“Glad I'm one of the good guys,” she whispered.

I turned my head. Smiled. “If you weren't, you'd be dead.”

“Good to know.” She brushed past me, all business. She turned the knob, and the door opened. “Charlie's inside. We didn't know when to expect you.”

Charlie was in the kitchen. He was putting water on the burner of the stove. “Tea?” he said as if I lived next door.

“Hot. Very hot,” I said.

They didn't say,
How'd it go
? or,
What the hell took you so long?

We drank tea in silence for what seemed a long time. Finally, I said, “There's seven missiles missing.”

“How inconsiderate,” Charlie said. “Armed?”

“They were arming the other fourteen. I can only assume.” I took out my iPhone. I gave Charlie and Jeri a blow-by-blow of the last twelve hours while I transmitted the videos from inside the plant to General Rutledge and Mr. Elliot. The files were huge. Even with compression technology, the iPhone's tiny antenna restricted bandwidth, and the process took agonizingly long minutes.

The transmission app finally beeped that the file transfer was completed.

Rutledge sent an alert. He needed to chat. No way he could have reviewed the videos already, so it had to be something else. I had a pretty good idea what it was.

“I saw the file,” he said. “You got in.” He didn't ask how.

“Academy Award–winning stuff,” I said. “Party time.”

“I'm on it as soon as we hang up.” His face compressed into a ball of deep concentration. I'd seen the look before.

“Problem?”

“Yeah. Several.”

“This have anything to do with Big Tuna?” I asked. We fell into basic tradecraft. Tag names only. Big Tuna: Atash Morshed. “I hope you don't want a word with him. He's under a bed in a hotel room. And the room probably doesn't smell particularly good right about now.”

“It's about the aces,” Tom said. He meant the circuits boards.

“Yeah, I know. The one's I took from him weren't the only ones, were they?” It may have sounded like a guess, but it wasn't. Not after what I'd seen in Natanz. “Spit it out. I'm a big boy.”

“Big Tuna was a decoy. Six hours ago, we learned there were actually forty-eight aces. While we were busy tracking Big Tuna, another player hit the ground with twenty-four more.”

“Makes sense. It was way too easy.” I told him about the seven unaccounted-for Sejil-2 missiles.

“Okay, priority one is their TO,” he said, meaning the missiles' targeting orders. Tom looked like he hadn't slept in a week, and his next statement sounded a bit like a man running on empty. “If there are any.”

“I think it would be pretty dumb to assume otherwise, don't you think?”

“Roger that.”

“I'm on it.”

“I know you are,” he said. “Keep the ball rolling, my friend.”

“Fast and furious.” We hung up.

I made a second call. Mr. Elliot must have had his finger on the Call button, because I heard his voice after a single ring. “You've been on with Orion,” he said. Orion: General Rutledge.

“You've been eavesdropping.”

“Which reminds me. Send a note to our friend in Virginia, will you? Catch him up before he has a heart attack,” Mr. Elliot said. “And it'll give me a chance to see who he's talking to.”

“Will do,” I said. “Remember Panama City?”

I heard a short, discerning pause. Not a question, just a rapid shifting of gears that took him back nearly three decades. He said, “Oh, you mean when everyone and their brother showed up at our party uninvited.” When he said
everyone,
he meant the ATF, the DEA, and a couple of guys from the FBI. “Jumped into our op with bullhorns blaring and bells clanging. What about it?”

“J.K.” These were the initials of one of the Iranian drug cartel's bagmen at the aforementioned “party.” His name was Jilil Kasra.

“Good-looking kid. Bright. Yeah, I remember.”

“I need a photograph.”

Mr. Elliot didn't ask why. If I made the request, it was important. He didn't ask by when. If I made the request, it meant as soon as possible. “Already done.”

He hung up. I looked at Charlie and said to him, “Tell me about your eyes and ears in National Security.” I was talking about the woman Charlie had recruited years ago to keep him informed about the comings and goings of Iran's infamous security service.

He nodded. “Jannata. What about her?”

“We need her to find an old friend of mine named Jilil Kasra.”