The Courier: A Ryan Kealey Thriller (6 page)

“Good morning.”

“Sorry to call you in on a Sunday morning,” he said as he went back to work. “How long did it take you to get here?”

“Door-to-door, just fifteen minutes,” she said.

“Not much of a hassle from Pimmit Hills at this hour on a weekend,” he said as he typed.

“None.”

She wasn’t impressed that he knew where in Virginia she lived. Whatever the alert was that had brought her here, the computer would have attached her file to it before shipping it to whoever had called this meeting—most likely the President’s national security director, Bruce Perry.

“If you’ll have a seat—there’s a name tag at the end—I wanted to take a few minutes to brief you before the President and the others arrive.”

Rayhan walked smartly to her seat in the corner of the small room. She would have the most information—otherwise, why call on her?—yet she would be farthest from the President. The young woman would never understand politics or egos. She settled into the leather swivel chair behind an open laptop. The only thing on the screen was the seal of the NSA: an eagle holding a key against a dark blue field.

“Very early this morning—before some of us had even gone to bed,” he remarked with affected complaint, “the Naval Space Command picked up a radioactive signal on the edge of the North Pole. It lasted a little over four minutes before it vanished—just as if it had never been there. Concurrently, the National Reconnaissance Office placed an Iranian frigate at the scene. The vessel was in the vicinity for less than an hour. However, the NRO did pick up a message from the ship as it turned about—I’m sending that to you now.”

Rayhan watched as the laptop image dissolved into a typescript in Farsi.

“How does that translate to you?”

“Rogue Starfish to Area Thirteen N,” she said.

“The NRO came up with ‘lone,’ not ‘rogue,’ ” he said. He finished typing, went to the seat beside the young woman, took a swallow of cooling coffee, and sat back. “Help yourself, by the way,” he said, pointing to a silver coffee service in the opposite corner.

Rayhan just smiled. She was a tea drinker. No one ever had that at these meetings.

“The word used in the communication,
istiqlehl
, means ‘independence.’ In the context of the military, it is more likely to mean an ‘independent operator without instructions,’ rather than ‘one acting alone.’ ”

“I’m not really clear on the difference.”

“The NRO interpretation has the vessel on patrol, which it probably was,” she said. “One of two Iranian warships at sea. But I believe the meaning is that something occurred outside the parameters of a routine voyage—and that it has taken action.”

“Hence, rogue,” Chavis replied thoughtfully. He regarded her for a moment. “Your father was a combat medic.”

“Yes, he received his medical training during the war with Iraq.”

Chavis seemed to be considering this. She knew from experience that her interpretation would pit the DNI against the NRO. He would want to have as much ammunition as possible for both sides.

General Clarke, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Breen, and the President arrived within seconds of one another, in that order. Rayhan and Chavis both rose and remained standing until the men were seated. Chavis shut the door. So she would be the only woman in the meeting, and a Muslim woman to boot. Despite the exhaustive background checks to which she and her family had submitted, she would be treated with a maximum of respect and a minimum of trust.

Chavis introduced her, the President seemed to remember her, and Admiral Donald Breen simply acknowledged her. As soon as everyone was seated, Chavis—still sitting next to Rayhan—repeated what he had told her, asked her to tell the others what she told him, and then everyone sat in silence for long, contemplative seconds. Rayhan stared at the President. He had just turned fifty-eight—she had read accounts of the surprise birthday party for “a few hundred friends” at the Kennedy Center. He was wearing a yellow sweater and khaki slacks. His hair was grayer than it had been when they first met, and his face seemed more lined and careworn than it did on TV. His voice, once the most resonant on the debate team at Georgetown University and, later, in the halls of Congress, sounded raw and strained after nearly eight years in the Oval Office. She couldn’t tell whether he was eager to be rid of the job or just bone-tired. Possibly both.

“General, what the hell could be out there?” the President asked at last, turning to his right.

Clarke shook his head. “We’ve checked satellites, submarines, and even migrating whales who might’ve swallowed a nuke,” he said. “There’s nothing.”

The President turned to his left. “Admiral?”

“We’ve got the same nothing right now,” he said. “We’re working on trying to grid-out their maritime charts. International waters are new for the Iranian Navy—we broke the code easily enough, but we aren’t sure how they’ve portioned the globe.”

“Admiral?” Rayhan said.

He looked at her without expression.

“Try any combination of these elements—al-F
’iz, 1154, and 1160.”

“What’s their significance?” the President asked.

“That is the name and the dates of the Thirteenth Caliph of Islam,” she said.

The room went dead for an instant and then seemed to come to life for the first time.

Breen looked at the President. “The heat bloom was just east of the Prime Meridian,” he said. “Fifteen degrees—the one and five buried in that first number—are due east and west of that.”

“The N would be north,” the President said. “The location for a rendezvous?”

“Not with any military vessels,” Breen said. He began typing. “A handoff to a mercantile vessel, though—that would be doable.”

“The frigate was a
Mowj-
class vessel,” Clarke said. “They’re air-equipped, range about 370-odd miles.”

Still typing, Breen said, “NRO doesn’t show a takeoff.”

“The NRO doesn’t show anything after they turned into a damn fogbank,” Clarke said. He glanced at Rayhan. “Pardon me.”

“It’s all right, sir,” she said. She didn’t like being ogled but she also didn’t like being treated as something porcelain-fragile.

“We’ve got a red spot in the fog, picked up with infrared,” Clarke went on. “That could have been a helicopter takeoff.”

No one said what was on everyone’s mind:
to where and carrying what
?

“What was this ship doing there?” the President asked.

“Sea trials,” Breen replied. “They came up the Atlantic coast, outside the territorial limits, just to show us they could. Then they turned toward the North Atlantic, presumably for cold-weather maneuvers. It’s a standard shakedown drill.”

“As for commercial shipping, Iran sails to virtually every Scandinavian port,” Clarke said, checking the laptop. “It’ll take a while to sort through the images, check those routes, and see who was in the neighborhood.”

The President looked from his computer to Rayhan. “Best guess,” he said. “What did the frigate find out there? Could it be a natural source of plutonium?”

The young woman had been expecting that. She continued to formulate her complete answer even as she spoke. “Mr. President, plutonium is exceedingly rare in nature. I would rule out a natural occurrence. If there are no reports of fallen satellites, that leaves reactors and warheads. Obviously, sir, it is not a reactor.”

“The
Mowj
class ships—of which there are just two—is not missile equipped,” Breen said.

“General, could it be an old missile?” the President asked. “Something that came in over the DEW line?”

The DEW line was the Distant Early Warning system, a radar array managed by the U.S. and Canada near the seventieth parallel to give advance warning of an over-the-pole Soviet attack. Rayhan had written a white paper on the repurposing of the surviving structures to detect nuclear material being smuggled across the borders.

“The Soviets would never have fired a live warhead at us, not even at the height of tensions between Kennedy and Khrushchev,” Clarke said.

“What about a dirty bomb—or whatever the equivalent might have been fifty years ago?” the President asked. “Could they have contaminated a small region as a warning?”

“The risk that we would retaliate before ascertaining that the missile was ‘only’ a dirty bomb would have been too great,” Clarke told him.

“Mr. President, maybe we’re looking at the thing bass ackwards,” Breen said. “This could be material on its way
to
North America. A little CARE package dropped off by the Iranians to be picked up by local operatives?”

“They had to know we’d pick it up on satellite,” Clarke said.

“Not if they opened the package by accident,” Breen said.

Rayhan tensed. The President noticed. “Ms. Jafari?”

“Mr. President, Admiral—jihadists are murderers and some lone wolves are reckless,” she said. “But anyone assigned to a nuclear package would not open it to see what’s inside, like a box of chocolates.”

“That wasn’t what I was implying,” Breen said testily.

“I understand, Admiral, but even the theoretical transport of nuclear material from a rogue state would have come from trained scientists and turned over to schooled couriers,” she said. “They would understand the basic protocols of handling plutonium—which, at close range, is one hundred percent lethal in a matter of hours. Moreover, sir,” she addressed the President now, “such parcels would be packaged in such a way that they could not be opened without some kind of key. Dropping them would not be like dropping a jack-in-the-box where the lid would simply pop open.”

The silence was uncomfortable now. Rayhan did not allow her eyes to drop or her shoulders to sag.

“What was the answer to the President’s question?” Clarke asked at last.

“I’m sorry, sir, I’ve forgotten—”

“Best guess,” Clarke said. “This is your field. You have the data. What’s out there?”

The young woman looked at the laptop and brought up the initial readings from the Naval Space Command. “The only match that comes to mind is the Manhattan Project,” she said. “These readings are consistent with the radiation levels of some of those early nuclear experiments.”

“An old device?” Clarke asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“All the studies we’ve done, ranging from home-made devices to missing Soviet-era warheads, would have very different readings—all of them far less potent than this. That heat bloom was produced by something extremely powerful and extremely raw.”

The silence returned, more thoughtful.

“What would an old nuclear device be doing in the Arctic Circle?” Breen asked.

The President said, “When we find it, we’ll know. Ms. Jafari—thank you. Gentlemen? Let’s track this thing down.”

T
hirty-seven-year-old Bijan Parvin, captain of the container ship
Ghorbani,
did not care about politics. He did not care about religion. But their impact on his life—that was another matter. He nurtured that like a fine tobacco.

He had served in the military as a young man, mostly so he could learn about shipping; when he had done his time, he went to sea as an assistant crane operator on a freighter. He was twenty-one at the time and had spent two years in the navy. For most Iranian men mandatory military service was twenty months. But if you were from a poor area like Parvin was—when he left drought-stricken Sístánva Balúchestá, his twelve-year-old sister was already a roadside worker, willing to do anything requested by passing motorists—four extra months were added to your tour of duty. The idea was that you would return to society with added skills and discipline. Parvin learned two things. One was his sea skills. The other was not to be an ideologue. Regimes came and went. Within regimes, petty warlords rose and fell. Standards were inconsistent and often in conflict. Beards that were permitted in one district were considered too long in another, too short in yet another, too thin to mean you were a man, too gray to qualify you for youthful labor. Religion? Most villages were Shi’a, some were Sunni, and then there was a smattering of Christians, Jews, and others. The combination of ways in which a man could be unacceptable in his surroundings was profound.

Not at sea.

On his way to and from naval vessels—mostly broken-down Russian ships that he learned to repair with spit and a prayer—Parvin had learned never to stray far from the international harbors. He never engaged in quiet political discussions or social debate, avoided cafés where he might be asked an opinion, and was a practicing Muslim only when he was among others who decided to pray. He had few possessions: the money he earned he sent home to his mother, his goatherd father, and his unwed sister.

When he went to work for Ostad Shipping three years earlier, Parvin knew there would be days like this one. Ostad was one of the smaller members of the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines Group. The entire IRISL operation had been sanctioned by the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations for allegedly advancing Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs by smuggling technology, parts, and the occasional scientist to the homeland in defiance of international law. Not only had Parvin witnessed some of the smuggling, he had become increasingly involved—and recompensed—for his hands-on involvement. He did not care about the right and wrong of it. He had no opinion other than this: the more money he made, the more comfortable he could make his family. Until his sister, now twenty-seven, could move to another village where her teenaged activities were not known, she stood no chance of being married. That required money, not just for her physical relocation but for a new identity. A potential suitor, especially one who was well-to-do or well connected, would routinely check to make certain the young woman was not hiding precisely the past she was hiding. The irony, of course, is that the chances were good said husband had employed the services of several women for whom selling their bodies was the only means of securing an income.

Parvin refused to let that embitter him. Unlike his sister, who was always angry, he was too practical. That was the way the classes functioned, had functioned, and probably would continue to function for the rest of his life. Which was why, when the government gave him an assignment in defiance of sanctions and outside lawful maritime practice, he closed his eyes and accepted. Not only could he use the additional income, it kept him connected with members of the military and intelligence communities. There was no way of knowing when those relationships might prove useful.

So when he received a message at 156.575 MHz, channel 70 on his digital signaling device, he plugged the encryption drive into the USB port and answered. The filter would sift the static that would be all a casual eavesdropper would hear. Even American or Israeli surveillance would require hours to pull the words from the variable frequency interference.

The beep that brought him to the radio secreted in his cabin was from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. Parvin did not know the name of the caller: only that he must do as he was told. The requests were typically to make pickups and drop-offs along whatever route he was traveling. Upon completion, payment would be made to his special bank account in Tehran. It was a profitable low-risk arrangement.

The
Ghorbani
had just left the Norwegian port with a cargo of shipbuilding equipment and parts bound for ports along North Africa and the Mediterranean. Parvin was told to divert to a spot in the Norwegian Sea ninety-eight kilometers due south of Sørkappin Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago. The caller provided the exact longitude and latitude and informed the captain that he should be prepared to receive, at ten p.m., and immediately conceal in its entirety, under tarpaulin, a Toufan helicopter. The pilot and his cargo were to be taken below, the aircraft was not to be approached by any of the crew once it had been secured, and the
Ghorbani
was to proceed to its initial port of call—Rabat, Morocco. Parvin was informed that he would receive further instructions, by radio, upon arriving.

The captain’s only comment during the entire recitation was to acknowledge it at the end. He passed the new destination to the helm. They informed him that the transit would take approximately an hour. Parvin would hold off on informing the radio room of their instructions until after the rendezvous. Then he grabbed a cola from the mini-refrigerator and sat on his bunk, where he hand-rolled a cigarette. He used Balkan shag tobacco, one of his few personal indulgences.

Parvin felt the faint, faint tickle of the constantly vibrating metal hull. He heard the distant hum of the ship’s powerful two-stroke, ten-cylinder engine. The order from Tehran was unprecedented. It made the captain afraid, as if the eyes of the world were somehow upon him. Certainly the eyes of the Minister of Intelligence were. The one constant in his occasional activities for the government is that they were not watched very closely and were relatively risk-free.

Why would they want me to quarantine an aircraft
? he wondered.
And why under the shadow of night
?

He wished he felt excited or patriotic or something other than worried.

“Whoever thought the shipping business would be more dangerous than the navy?” he asked himself with a nervous laugh after he had lit the cigarette with a wooden match and drained the can.

He thought about his sister and his parents and how this was helping them. That calmed him somewhat, and he reminded himself that he was not alone; he had a very powerful ally in this particular assignment. The ministry itself was going to make sure that the harbormasters who were expecting him would stand down. That gave him a slight thrill of importance—not enough to offset the fear but not a bad sensation.

The captain finished his cigarette, washed his face in the small basin beside his fold-down desk, and went up to the bridge. He would not be able to tell the crew anything about their mission, but that, too, was a consolation. It would elevate him in their eyes.

The more he thought about it, the more surprised Parvin was to find himself growing excited about the next few hours. By the time they reached the coordinates, he was actually thrilled to be doing this, happy for the challenge and responsibility and whatever he might learn.