The Increment (3 page)

“Is it a setup? Is it a dangle, to see how we react?”

“Maybe. But that’s CI’s problem, not yours.”

“Is he crazy?”

“Possibly. But so what? If the information is for real, who cares?”

“Will he get caught? I mean, what’s the chance of sending a message like this, and nobody seeing it? They have a good service. You know that better than anyone. You had to pick up the pieces after the postal fiasco.”

“Hard to say. But you have to assume he knows what he’s doing. He wouldn’t have sent it if he didn’t think he could do it without leaving fingerprints. Kids know how to do this stuff, Harry. Iran is full of hackers and computer nerds.”

Harry was still shaking his head. He wanted to see in his mind the person who had sent the message.

“Help me out, Marcia. You understand Iranians. What kind of person would do this? Assuming that it isn’t a setup, and that he isn’t crazy.”

Marcia pondered a moment. Why did anyone do anything? But Harry wanted an answer, so she thought back over the dozens of Iranian cases she had reviewed over too many years.

“He’s smart,” she began. “He’s proud. He’s unhappy. He’s young. He has a need, for some reason, to share what he knows. He’s not asking us for anything, he’s telling us. But this message is a tease. An opening bid. Iranians never give you the whole slice. It’s
taarof
.”

“Remind me. What’s
taarof
?”

“It’s their way of doing business. The dignity thing. They don’t want to name a price. That would be undignified. So they make a gift, and wait for you to respond. It’s unmanly to ask. Unwomanly, too.”

“He’s trusting the agency, in other words,” said Harry. “Not to fuck it up, I mean.”

“What an idiot,” muttered Marcia. “Doesn’t he read the newspapers?”

It all moved slowly
at first, before it hit the tripwires.

It was Pappas’s case, since, as the director liked to remind him, he owned every speck of dust blowing out of Iran. He filed the initial message under the designator BQDETERMINE, which was the agency’s cryptonym for all Iranian collection operations, and gave “Dr. Ali” a provisional crypt of BQTANK.

But Harry knew he would have to share, right away, so he called Arthur Fox, the head of the Counter-Proliferation Division. He didn’t like Fox, who was always trying to show everyone what a hard-ass he was, but he had no choice. He proposed a meeting that afternoon and asked Fox to bring one of his nuclear specialists.

“So what do you
think, Arthur?” asked Pappas when they had gathered a few hours later in a secure conference room. “Is this for real?” His big body was hunched over the conference table, his shoulders stooped as if burdened by the new weight they were carrying.

“Looks real,” said Fox. He held a copy of the Dr. Ali message up to his nose. “Smells real. So a logical inference would be that it
is
real.” Fox was a fastidious man; when he sniffed his nose, you understood that he was accustomed to fine wines and gourmet sauces. There was money in his background somewhere. That was a funny thing about the new tough guys. They came from the better side of town. They talked hard, but they had soft hands.

Harry needed Fox’s help, and he didn’t mind acting dumb. He had done it to good effect his whole career.

“What does it tell you, Arthur, assuming it’s real? Did we already know this?”

“It’s showtime, that’s what it tells me. We knew the Iranians were getting higher enrichment levels at Natanz, but we had not confirmed they were above seven percent. Suspected it, maybe; feared it, certainly. But the fact they’re at thirty-five percent—assuming it’s a fact—is news. Pretty serious news. Some people could argue—
some people
—that we should bomb the whole damn complex tomorrow, before it goes any further. Been saying that for years, in fact, but nobody has been listening.”

“Hold the speech a minute. I thought they needed ninety percent before they had the goods. Maybe this message is telling us they’re stuck. What about that?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Harry. You want to wait for them to explode a bomb before you decide they’re serious? Bad idea.”

Harry nodded. Fox was right, even if he was a jerk.

“What about the seven percent batch? My guy Reddo thinks that may be a big deal. He thinks the ‘D
₂
O?’ notation may mean they’re thinking about sending enriched uranium to a heavy-water reactor, and then reprocessing it later to make plutonium. Does that make sense?”

“Any allegation about Iran makes sense, Harry. These people are
dangerous.
We didn’t know about a plutonium program. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have one. If I had to bet, I would bet worst case.”

“Why am I not surprised? Bomb, bomb, bomb. Let’s bomb Iran.”

“That’s unworthy of you, Harry.”

“Just joking, Arthur.” Harry looked back at the text of the message from the mysterious Iranian correspondent.

“What about the other notations and formulas? Reddo wasn’t sure what they meant. What do they tell you?”

Fox’s nuclear expert spoke up. He was a young man named Adam Schwartz. He had graduated from MIT a few years ago. Pappas wasn’t sure why such a talented young man had joined a screwed-up government agency rather than making megabucks like the other smart kids.

“So I can’t say whether our mystery informant is part of the Iranian nuclear program, but he certainly has access to what’s going on,” said Schwartz. He looked down at the paper in front of him, as if to double-check. “His hexafluoride formula has several unusual signatures that match some anomalies in the samples we have from the Iranian program. He must know that. I think that’s why he sent the message. This is his statement of bona fides. So if I had to guess, I would say that, yes, he is a part of the program.”

Schwartz looked at his boss, who was frowning. “But I don’t know,” the analyst added.

“Dr. Ali,” said Harry quietly, half to himself.

“Say what?” queried Fox.

“Dr. Ali, you piss me off.” Harry spoke the name louder, as if the Iranian himself were sitting with them in the secure conference room. “I mean, give me a break. We’ve been killing ourselves trying to recruit someone like you, and now you walk in the door. Except you don’t even do that. You send a message to our website, like you’re signing up for summer camp. Are you fucking with me, Dr. Ali?”

“Maybe he’s real,” said Fox. “Maybe not. But how would you know, eh? This is pretty technical stuff, Harry. Easy to get suckered.” Fox was playing Pappas. His manner said that he wanted control of the case.

“Tell you what, Arthur. I know one problem with this case already, which is that too many people have copies of this message. A distribution list this wide and we’ll be reading about it in the
New York Times
. And then we can kiss Dr. Ali goodbye, whoever he is. This is an RH case, starting now.” RH was the agency’s term for “restricted handling.”

“Then close it down,” said Fox brusquely.

Pappas just nodded. He had already done that, before the meeting even started. He had created a special-access program, an “SAP,” many of whose members were sitting in the room.

“We need to create a legend for this guy,” Pappas said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that we’ve got to kill Dr. Ali off in cable traffic so nobody asks, ‘Hey, whatever happened to that Iranian VW who sent the nuclear stuff?’ We lay a trail that leads everyone off in the wrong direction, and then we handle the case in the SAP. Is everyone cool with that?”

“Who runs it?” asked Fox. The natural set of his eyes was a squint.

“We both do. IOD and Counter-Proliferation. It will be a joint case. We’ll bring in the Info Ops Center for computer support, plus the director and the head of the clandestine service. That’s it.”

“Who briefs the NSC?” pressed Fox. Meaning, Who gets face time with the president?

Fox was still bargaining. He lived for turf battles like this. Pappas decided to give ground. He didn’t like going to the White House. They got all wound up in the Situation Room, and then they did the wrong thing. The people who paid the price for their mistakes were kids like his son. Let Fox spin them if he wanted.

“You do it,” he said. “It’s about nuclear. Your people will do the briefings and the technical support. We’ll run operations, like he’s a real agent. And we’ll work our asses off trying to find him and make actual contact, as opposed to this virtual bullshit. How’s that?”

Fox smiled. What he wanted was to control access to the policy makers. This was potentially a very hot case. Pappas had given away the customers. He was a fool, in Fox’s book.

“We’ll see how it goes,” Fox said. Everything was provisional with him, in case the wind changed. “What do we do next?”

Pappas shrugged his shoulders. It was an effort for him to tolerate Fox, who was one of those intelligence officers who had never run a big operation, never recruited an agent whose life was on the line. He didn’t have the feel of the work on his fingertips; the sticky-sweet touch of espionage. Nobody did anymore. That’s why they were reduced to waiting for the VWs.

“We fucking well answer Dr. Ali’s message, that’s what we do next. But we do it very carefully. And then we start generating the traffic to tell everyone he was a phony.”

Fox’s eyes narrowed tighter, like a cat that hasn’t made up its mind whether to eat the food or bolt.

“Just one more question,” said Fox. “How are we going to use this guy, once we get started?”

“Very carefully. So we don’t get him killed.”

“Don’t overdo the tradecraft stuff, Harry. We need information. This is a big one. We need to exploit it now, for all it’s worth. Assuming it’s for real.”

Harry shook his head. Wrong. Fox’s bravado was the kind of talk that got agents killed.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Harry said. “We’re going to be smart. And we’re going to be patient. And we’re going to remember that there is a human being on the other end of that email address. And we’re going to make sure that whatever we tell the White House is true. How’s that?”

Fox shrugged. Pappas didn’t get it. The message had changed the stakes. This wasn’t about what the CIA wanted. This was going to ring the bells downtown. But he did as Pappas suggested. The White House was briefed, but cautiously. The tear-sheet version was that a new Iranian source said the Iranians had passed the enrichment level needed for civilian nuclear use and were moving toward weapons-grade level. The new source also indicated the possibility of an Iranian heavy-water reactor program. The report was unconfirmed. The source was of untested reliability. His identity and bona fides were unknown. The agency was working to confirm and evaluate the reports.

What they put in writing, in official channels, was all true. But Pappas suspected that Fox was already talking behind his back, spinning the information with his friends downtown nearly as fast as the rotors on those Iranian centrifuges. That was what Fox did. He lived to make trouble other people would have to fix.

The setting summer sun
glittered in the western windows of the young scientist’s apartment in Yoosef Abad. He put his feet up on the coffee table and tried to relax. The stereo was playing a CD by a folk group from the Persian Gulf called Jahleh, which had won a prize at the Tehran Independent Music Festival. They were hip, but also safe. That was his protection—to be ordinary. Deceit was a habit; you put it on and took it off like a suit of clothes. That was his ritual each morning when he rose and prepared for work, and each night when he came home to this apartment. But what was normal? Was it to be afraid or unafraid? Was it to remember things or forget them? He took off his coat. His father’s gold cuff links shone with the same faint light as the disappearing sun.

He was restless. He rose from the leather couch and walked to the small study where he kept his computer. It was a Mac PowerBook, only six months old. It had cost him over four thousand dollars at Paytakht, a Tehran store that managed to import, with a hefty markup, most of what you could get in Dubai. When he bought it, he had imagined that it was an escape hatch that would allow him to leave the velvet prison of his “special” job and flee to other worlds. The computer was so fast, and with his new satellite connection, he could land on any virtual space he liked. In the beginning, it had been exhilarating. But now he was frightened of the computer. The Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard had its IP address, just as they had the coordinates of anything else that was officially connected to him. He had to live outside his body now, in the shells of other creatures.

The young man walked to the bookcase and took down one of his parents’ photo albums. They had been shutterbugs, his mother and father. They seemed to buy a new camera every other year, and miles of Kodak film—always Kodak, his father didn’t trust the Japanese. Some of their devout Muslim friends said it was a profanation, to make these images, but his father just laughed. These were the
jahiliya,
the ignorant ones. They thought they could dam up the sunlight, and make day into night.

He turned the pages of the album. There were pictures of his mother and father at their little beach house at Ramsar on the Caspian Sea. His mother looked like a 1960s movie star in the early pictures, dressed in her bathing suit and wearing her hair in a lacquered wave. As the years passed, the bathing suit was shrouded by a cover-up and the hair disappeared behind a scarf, and then his mother disappeared altogether, dead of cancer before she was fifty years old. He had been just eleven when she died; he could remember her smell, and her gentle touch, but she survived for him mainly in these albums. In addition to pasting in his father’s photographs, she liked to add pictures she had clipped from glossy magazines, of Iranian writers and movie stars. There were shots of the handsome Fardin and the lovely Azar Shiva, the stars of the romantic film
Sultan of My Heart
. They were ghosts of a lost world.

The album fell open to a photograph he had never examined closely before. It showed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on a visit to Shiraz in the early 1970s. His mother had written a caption with all the details. He studied the picture. Jackie was dressed in white slacks low on the hip and a royal blue shirt, so slim and elegant. The camera had caught her in motion, pushing her long black hair away from her beautiful face as she looked to her left toward something that had caught her eye. She was walking down a grand array of stone steps, leaving the covered portico of some sort of monument. There were bodyguards on either side of her, dressed in black suits and skinny black ties. He looked at her more closely: so much wondrous hair, uncovered, and the pants so finely cut you could see the shape of her hips and thighs. Could this now be the same country to which the Queen of the World, Jackie Kennedy, had once paid a visit? If she were to come back now, would they cover her in a sack like a dead animal? Yes, of course they would. Jackie was an offense against their idea of Islam.

His father must have taken the picture. But what was he doing in Shiraz when Jackie Kennedy visited? Perhaps he had been asked to give lecture on Persian literature. Or maybe he had just been a tourist.

The shah was a pimp, his father had told him once, when he was a boy. His father had hated the shah, and the Pahlavi regime in turn had hated him. The young man had to remind himself of that now. His father had been an intellectual and a freethinker, and probably in his youth, a communist, too. No one had ever talked about that, but it must have been so.

Whatever it was that his father had believed, he had suffered for it. He had been arrested twice, the second time just after his son was born—just before the revolution. The shah’s men must have thought he was still dangerous—this broken-down professor living in a dream world of memories of his dead wife and Kodak pictures. That was how stupid the Savak had been, that they imagined this harmless man was a threat.

When the revolution had come, his father had rejoiced: you could see that in his face in the pictures taken at the great demonstration at the Shahyar monument that marked the beginning of the end. The look in his father’s eyes was one of revenge. The son had never asked him what the shah’s men had done to him in prison, but he could imagine. When he was a boy, after the revolution, the simple
basiji
treated him like a hero’s son, a martyr’s son. By then, his father had seen the truth, and though he never said it out loud, he had come to despise the revolution.

They are liars, his father had said. They have made a refuse dump and called it a green park. He told his son to go away, to study in Germany and never come back. But the son hadn’t listened. He liked the power that knowledge brought him. He liked knowing secrets. He thought he could be smarter than his father, and make a hiding place for himself where the
jahiliya,
the ignorant ones, couldn’t find him. But after several years in the white offices of Jamaran, he knew this was impossible.

He closed the album.
He wasn’t hungry, but he thought he should eat. He went to the kitchen and found some rice and chicken the maid had left. This was his life, living inside the exoskeletons of other people. He was warming the chicken in his new microwave oven when the phone rang. He didn’t like to answer it anymore at home, for fear of who it might be. But when the recording of the answering machine clicked on, he recognized the voice and picked up the receiver.

It was his cousin
Hossein. The bitter one. He had served with the Revolutionary Guard for so many years; he had done everything they asked of him, and now they had thrown him away. You could hear it in his voice. They had taken his balls away. His wife was visiting her sister, Hossein said. He wanted to go out and have some fun. Go to a restaurant, maybe meet some girls. There was a little slur in his voice, as if he had already started drinking, or maybe smoking opium or taking pills—it didn’t make any difference once they took your balls away. The young man said he was tired; he’d had a long day at the
daneshgah
, the “university,” which was his euphemism for where he worked. But Hossein wouldn’t hear of it. He was urging, almost pleading for company. He said that he would pick up his cousin outside the apartment in Yoosef Abad in fifteen minutes. The young man agreed; anything to get Hossein off the phone before he said something really stupid that someone might overhear.

Hossein had a jar
of home brew in his car. It had the sharp, acidic taste of raw alcohol, masked with some orange juice. The young man said no at first, but then he took a swig. He wanted obliteration and escape tonight, as much as Hossein did. He looked at his cousin; he still had the hard, pitted face of a Revolutionary Guard, but the eyes had gone soft. He was rotting from the inside out. Now there was nothing for him to do but drink and be angry; eventually he would make a mistake, and they would destroy him for good. Hossein did not know how to live inside a lie; that was his problem. He had actually believed in the revolution, and now that it had expelled him, he didn’t know what to do.

They cruised the streets for a while in Hossein’s green Peugeot, crawling up Vali Asr Avenue in the slow traffic that allowed them to look at the pretty girls in the streets. They knew how to be sexy, even in their scarves and cloaks. They were wearing spike heels, the daring ones, so that their legs were long and tight and their asses swayed from side to side. The girls could watch Fashion TV on the pirate satellite stations, so they knew how to move like models. The boys could watch it too, and jerk off when they showed lingerie and swimsuits.

“I want a woman,” said Hossein. He was drunk. They had finished the first bottle of home brew and started a second.

“Do you want a disease, too?” asked the young man. “Because they go together.”

“You are too careful. What’s the matter with you? Have you been visiting Qazvin?” That was an insult. Iranians liked to joke that the men of the city of Qazvin, northwest of Tehran, were all homosexuals.

“Fuck you, my dear cousin,” said the young man. “We’ll go wherever you want.”

Hossein drove to a little coffeehouse called Le Gentil on Gandhi Street, a few blocks over from Vali Asr. He said there would be pretty girls there—foreign ones, which meant girls who maybe would fool around. But when they arrived the tables were filled with couples, and the few single women drew back from them. Hossein still looked too much like a Revolutionary Guard. That was his problem. He wanted to be a rebel now, but he still looked like a soldier of Allah. Hossein went out to his car to smoke some opium. When he came back he was talking too fast.

“They screwed me, you know that!” Hossein growled. “They can shit on their beards, for all I care.”

“Shhh!” said the young scientist. “Of course I know that, but keep your voice down. You never know who’s listening, even in a
gherti
place like this.”

“They screwed me,” Hossein repeated. “I did everything they asked me to. I did more than they asked me to. Nobody understood the imam’s line better than me. Nobody felt the blood of the martyrs like me. But then they screwed me.”

“Hayf,”
said the young man. A shame. “It was wrong what they did. Everyone knows that. You must get over it. Move on, cousin.”

“Agh! Do you know why I lost my position? Because I caught them stealing. That’s the reason. Otherwise I would still be a colonel and tell them what to do. They are dogs!
Pedar-sag.
The sons of dogs. No, they are the
shit
of the dogs on the bottom of my shoes!”

“Kesafat!”
muttered a woman at a nearby table. Filth. She was embarrassed by this loud, sloppy
pasdaran,
sitting in what was supposed to be a cosmopolitan café.

“Shhh!!” said the young man again. His cousin was making him nervous. Even in a noisy café, the police had informants.

“Yes, I did. I caught them stealing. Our company was very, you know, quiet-quiet. It did business abroad. I don’t have to tell you…you know what. So they thought they could take money and no one would see. But I saw. And I tried to stop them. And now…”

Hossein stopped as the misery of his current circumstances enveloped him.

“And now you should go home,” said the young man. But Hossein ignored him. He leaned over and whispered hoarsely in his cousin’s ear. His breath reeked of alcohol.

“Do you think I could get a job in America? Or in Germany, I don’t care.”

“Sure. If you can get there.”

“But that is what I mean, cousin. Can you help me? My stick is broken, you know. Nobody will help me except you.”

This was what the young man feared most. That his cousin, in his misery, would try to use him to escape. This was truly dangerous, to be dragged down by a ruined ex-
pasdaran
with too many enemies.

“I don’t think I can help, my dear.”

“But you have power, cousin. You have connections. You have everything. We all know what you do. We know you are part of the network.”

“Be quiet!” said the young man sharply. “That’s enough. Let’s go.”

Hossein wagged his finger at his cousin.
“Khak tu saret.”
Dirt on your head. It was almost a curse.

“Quiet,” repeated the scientist.

“You are ungrateful. You are one of them, the privileged ones, so you think you can shit on your cousin when he is in need. How can you say this? For the memory of your father, my dear uncle, you should help me. You must help me. Otherwise I don’t know what I will do. I don’t know. It is so hard, to keep a face on…”

There were tears trickling down Hossein’s cheeks. The young man put his arm around his cousin’s shoulder. People were watching, but he didn’t care anymore.

“I will try to help you, Hossein. I will do what I can. But you must be very careful now. We all live on the edge of a knife. You know that. If you slip, it will cut you.”

The young man paid the bill and helped Hossein out of the café and back onto the street toward the car. Hossein was in no condition to drive, so the young man took them back to Hossein’s apartment off Mirdamad Avenue. He had passed out in the car, so they both slept there in the Peugeot for a few hours, until it was dawn, and then the young man went to look for a taxi to take him back to his apartment in Yoosef Abad.

He had a headache
from the booze. His eyes were bloodshot. To rouse himself, he thought of his work. They had scheduled more tests of the equipment this week. Probably more failures. They would go to the special laboratory where they kept the most sensitive instruments. Probably he would have to stay overnight, perhaps for the whole week.