The Increment (32 page)

The taxi driver at
Dulles wanted to talk. He was Iranian, of course. They all were at Dulles. He wanted to rant about how terrible the mullahs were, and how America should go to war now that the regime was in trouble. Harry said he didn’t know anything about Iran; he was just a businessman and wanted everybody to be friends.

Andrea was still at work when he got to the townhouse in Reston. He left his wife a note that he was back. He thought of taking a nap, but he was restless. He wanted to go into the office and read back into the cable traffic—and troll through the overhead imagery and the SIGINT, to see how much he could piece together from that record about what had happened in Iran.

Harry was about to leave for Langley when the bus dropped off his daughter Louise. She bounded into the house and leapt into his arms.

“You’re home, you’re home!” she said.

Louise wasn’t usually so demonstrative. Harry was pleased. He wanted to be hugged.

“I
need
to talk to you, Daddy,” she said dramatically. “I’ve made a big decision. I don’t want to go to college.”

Harry was flummoxed. Louise was a junior in high school. This was the year she needed to be thinking about getting ready for college, not about how to avoid it.

“College is important, Lulu. Unless you go to college, you won’t get a good job. And you’ll be poor, and you’ll have to work at Wal-Mart or mow people’s lawns or be a bum. You have to go to college.”

“I’ll go to college sometime, Daddy, but not now. That’s what I meant. I don’t want to go now. I want to do something else. The world is such a mess. I couldn’t concentrate if I was in school, I would just think about all the people who are miserable. I want to work for Doctors Without Borders. They talked about it on
Scrubs
.”

“But Lulu, you have to be a doctor to work for Doctors Without Borders. Or a nurse. Get your education. The world will still be a mess when you graduate, I promise.”

“No, I want to go now. I need to. There’s this cool organization I found out about called FXB that helps AIDS orphans in Africa. Maybe I can work for them. I can’t just sit here and let it all
happen,
Daddy. I can’t.”

“Let’s talk about it later, Lulu. I understand what you’re saying, but I have to go to work now. I’ll be proud of you whatever you do. You have a big heart. That’s the most important thing.”

She gave him another hug and walked him to the car. As Harry was driving down Route 7, it occurred to him that Louise was like her brother Alex. She was an idealist. She couldn’t wait to make a difference. She was talking about saving orphans in Africa with the same passion that Alex had expressed about stopping the people who had destroyed the Twin Towers. Maybe that was the difference. A page had turned.

Harry got to headquarters
in the late afternoon. The foreign liaison officers and the larcenous contractors were streaming out the door. Harry badged himself through the gate and walked the short distance down C Corridor to the Iran Operations Division. Someone at the gate must have forewarned Marcia, because she was waiting just inside the door, next to the Imam Hussein.

“We need to talk,” she said. “Now.”

“Not yet. Let me read into the traffic and run some traces. Then I have to see the director, tonight or tomorrow. Sometime.”

“No, sir. You do your reading, but then see me. And don’t go near the seventh floor until we’ve talked. You have a problem you don’t even know about. It has three initials. F-B-I.”

“Oh fuck. What do they want?”

“They aren’t sure. They wanted to question me about your travel. I told them to piss off until they had a subpoena.”

“Do they have anything?”

“Who knows? They’re such assholes, anyway. So how can I help? What do you need, other than a glass of Scotch, which you’ll have to get for yourself?”

“I need good intelligence about Iran. Especially now. Make sure I have all the Iran traffic over the past week. Then call all the liaison officers in town who know
anything
and tell them I need their best current stuff, immediately. Have them pulse their people back home, no matter how late it is. And tell NSA I need special onetime access to the raw Iran SIGINT. Whatever has been translated. If anyone squawks, tell them I personally will make sure they get sent to a listening post in Okinawa.”

“What else? You said traces.”

“I want you to run every database you can for the name ‘Al-Majnoun.’ That means ‘the Crazy One’ in Arabic, so presumably he’s an Arab. But he’s in Iran. Or at least I think he is.”

“I know what Al-Majnoun means, for God’s sake,” Marcia muttered, walking away. “Maybe I even know who he is. Not that you would care. But let me check my sick, alcohol-poisoned memory to make sure. Any other demeaning requests?”

“Call the National Reconnaissance Office. Tell them I want to TiVo Mashad, forty-eight hours ago.”

Harry went into his
office and closed the door. He logged on to his computer and began searching the cable log. He wanted to lay down for himself a picture of the cards that were visible in the intelligence reporting they already had. The U.S. intelligence community didn’t know much about Iran, but it knew a little. And its liaison partners knew more: if there was commotion within the security establishment of any foreign nation, it usually left some electronic or physical markings that could be captured and analyzed.

The agency’s own reporting was thin. How could it be otherwise? They had one good source in the Iranian nuclear program, and now he was dead. Harry found one report that had come in two days ago from the station in Dubai. They were running an agent who was a member of the Ministry of Intelligence; he picked up talk from people who had access to real secrets.

The header on the cable was
SHAKE-UP COMING IN TEHRAN?
It reported Iranian corridor gossip that heads would be rolling soon in the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence because of a big screwup there. The station chief, wanting to show how smart he was, had played down the rumor as sibling rivalry, noting that MOI officers were always forecasting doom for the Rev Guard. But Harry had reason to take the report more seriously. He messaged Dubai to call a crash meeting with its source, to see if they could pull more.

Next Harry checked the foreign liaison file, which had gotten a little fatter in the past few minutes since Marcia sent out her whip. Multiple sources were reporting that there had been some unusual gatherings in Tehran the past few days. The Turks had a source who claimed that the head of the Ministry of Intelligence had been summoned to the Supreme Leader’s compound by the national security adviser. A Mossad agent within the Syrian moukhabarat, who happened to be on a trip to Iran, reported that there was a panic within Rev Guard intelligence over the disappearance of one of their senior officers involved in security of the nuclear program. The Iranians feared that the officer had defected to Israel. No such luck, said the Mossad representative in Washington.

The most intriguing report had come in that day from a Russian intelligence officer planted in an IAEA inspection team that was visiting Iran for yet another discussion of inspection procedures. The Russian reported that over the past twenty-four hours, access to all Iranian nuclear facilities—declared and undeclared—had been shut down. Even Iranians with normal security clearances couldn’t get into their usual workplaces, as of this morning. The IAEA team had made an urgent query to their contact on the Iranian president’s staff. And that office was in a panic, too.

Harry felt a little of his gloom dissipate. Something bad had happened inside the Iranian nuclear program. They were trying to figure out how bad. Senior people were being summoned. Scientists’ access was blocked. Even the Iranian president was nervous. A shit storm was rising in Tehran. That was promising.

Okay, so what did
he know? What
had
to be true, no matter what had happened on the way to that deadly fireball across the riverbed at Kalat? He knew that even if the operation in Mashad had been a total washout, the Iranians would be scrambling. A scientist in their nuclear program was dead. By now, they would have identified Karim Molavi’s body in that burnt-out car. Probably they wouldn’t be able to identify Jackie from what was left of her body, and the identities of the other two members of the Increment team were probably covered, too, unless the Brits had been sloppy. So the Iranians wouldn’t have proof, but they were paranoid enough to guess at the truth. Their scientist had died trying to escape Iran with foreign intelligence agents. He had been recruited as a foreign spy. Everything he had touched was contaminated, and they couldn’t be sure how far the stain spread. They had to suspect that the worst had happened: their nuclear program had been penetrated.

The Iranians would have to take action quickly. Harry knew he wouldn’t see it outright, lit up in bold. They were too careful for that. But he would see shadows, as people moved to protect other parts of the nuclear program that had suddenly come under suspicion. He would hear echoes of voices, summoning people for interrogation, calling them back from posts overseas where they were vulnerable. That was what he would look for—the aftershocks.

Harry dug into the NSA file. The messages were queued in a way that made them hard to search, so he called in Tony Reddo, one of his smart kids, and asked him to set a filter that captured anything that involved a sudden recall of personnel or change in status within the past forty-eight hours. It didn’t work at first, but Reddo made a phone call to a friend at NSA and played around with the search parameters until he had something for Harry to look at. And you could see it, when you put in the right keywords, just looking at the list of intercepts that came up. They were pulsing their system: Frankfurt, London, Dubai, Beirut. They had code breaks for only some of the traffic, but even where they couldn’t read it in plain text, the traffic analysis suggested that key people—known members of Iran’s secret establishment—were being pulled out of their normal positions and brought home.

On a hunch, Harry called the cybergeeks at the Counter-Terrorism Center and asked them to do a quick check of all passengers who had traveled to Tehran from Europe the past two days. Get the names and match them up with any known intelligence, security, or defense people. It came back in an hour, and it confirmed what the SIGINT had indicated—that a lot of very senior people were being called home in a hurry.

Marcia stuck her head
in the door. Harry could smell the cigarette smoke on her clothes. She really wasn’t supposed to do that, but it wasn’t a night in which he wanted to enforce the rules.

“It’s getting late,” she said. “You should eat something.”

“I’m not hungry. Go away.”

“Tough shit, Harry. I brought you something anyway from the cafeteria. It’s not very appetizing, but that’s life.” She handed a tray through the door and dropped it on Harry’s desk. It was a bowl of pea soup and a cheeseburger. Harry ate it all, gratefully.

What about Ashgabat?
The Iranians had to be mobilizing there. They would have found the Mitsubishi van that had crashed the border, and the dead Turkman driver. They wouldn’t learn much, but they would realize that Molavi had been smuggled into the country from Turkmenistan before the botched attempt to exfiltrate him. That would scare Tehran all the more. They would pull whatever chains they had in the Turkmen capital to figure out what had gone down.

Harry phoned the chief of the CIA’s two-person station in Ashgabat, a woman named Anita Pell. It was already early morning there, but she sounded as if she had been awakened from a deep sleep. Poor Anita. He hadn’t informed her that he had been in Turkmenistan, and he didn’t do so now. What would he tell her? He had gone there as an operative of a foreign power, Great Britain.

Harry asked Anita Pell to call her liaison officer in the Turkmen security service, right now, and request any information they had about unusual Iranian activities the last few days.

“And wake him
up
?” Anita Pell sounded shocked. Yes, Harry said, wake him up now, and go see him as soon as he’ll receive you. Send anything you get, as soon as you get it.

Harry felt sorry for her. She had been the only officer to bid for Ashgabat when it came open last year. Her husband had run off with his secretary eight months before, so she said yes. Turkmenistan had been a nice, easy nap until this moment, when all the shit in the world had come down on her head.

Two hours later, Harry had his Ashgabat file. The chief of the Turkmen security received Anita Pell himself—that was a first. He reported highly unusual activity at the Iranian embassy. The lights had been on all night the past two nights; the Turkmen guards posted outside said people had been coming and going constantly, and that the Iranians were burning documents inside the compound. What’s more, the Iranian consulate on the Turkmen side of the Saraghs border crossing had been working nonstop, too, and several dozen Iranian security officials with diplomatic passports had come across the border two days ago, questioning their contacts on the Turkmen side.

“The Turkmen want to know if they can help,” Anita explained on the secure phone. “The chief was very agitated. He said something big went down on the border a couple days ago. He seemed surprised that I didn’t know anything.”

“What’s there to know?” Harry answered sweetly.

“Don’t humiliate me, Harry. I don’t deserve that. What’s going on?”

“Stay tuned. It will all become clear. Either that or it won’t. But however it plays out, you’re going to need some help. I’ll send you one of my kids tomorrow.”