The Increment (33 page)

Anita Pell protested that she didn’t require any assistance, thank you very much, but she sounded relieved, nonetheless, that she would be getting some.

Harry wanted to be
on the ground in Mashad. That was impossible, obviously. The CIA had precious few sources in Tehran, let alone eastern Iran. But thanks to technical coverage, he was able to get pretty close. His advantage was that he knew what to look for. He had the coordinates of the Ardebil Research Establishment, and it was easy enough for the cartographers to do a quick fix on where it was, just above the northern ring road. The imagery was there—the satellites made their passes over Iran every day like clockwork, so that there was near-constant coverage, and every digital transmission lived forever in the magic archive. You could play back reality as if it were on tape.

The National Reconnaissance Office maintained an ops center at Langley for agency officers who wanted to look at the world on rewind. Marcia had phoned the technicians a few hours before and made a special request. They were grumpy and hard to deal with, but so was Marcia. She gave the techs Harry’s search parameters. When they were ready, she called Harry and toddled off with him to a distant room in the new wing, out by the Brown and Yellow parking lots.

“Don’t be a jerk with these people, Harry,” Marcia said as they made the long walk to the NRO ops center. “They are doing you a favor. People still do that. Even here.”

“I
am
a jerk,” said Harry. “Do you have a problem with that?”

Harry had the NRO
techs dial back to the time Karim was supposed to have left the research center in Mashad, about four in the afternoon. The daylight cameras were still working, so the resolution was good. It took a few minutes, but Harry finally identified the Mitsubishi waiting outside. In the imagery of the Ardebil employees departing the lab, Harry saw what he thought was Karim, leaving with someone who had to be his friend Reza.

It was all there in digital memory, like a playback of life. Harry watched Reza’s Peugeot head south to the restaurant; he saw the Mitsubishi tagging behind, too. He sped the images ahead while Karim and Reza were in the restaurant, and then resumed the visual narrative when Reza’s Peugeot was driving north again, once more followed by the Mitsubishi van.

The two cars headed toward the hills above the city, slowly winding through traffic and taking the main road toward Tus, until Reza’s Peugeot turned into the drive of what must be his home, followed thirty seconds later by the Mitsubishi van. Karim led Reza up to the front door of his villa, and then inside. A bit later, a lithe figure that had to be Jackie went into the house with a second operative, leaving behind the third man, it looked like Hakim, to keep watch outside.

And then it all went haywire: a black sedan pulled into the drive; you didn’t see it at first, because it wasn’t showing any headlights. The first sign was the bright spark of a weapon being fired, and then the dreadful sight of Hakim falling, shooting as he went down. Night had fallen now, and the infrared images were harder to read, but you could see enough to understand what had happened. The shooter got out of the black sedan and swiftly executed the poor Turkmen smuggler who had been unlucky enough to be hired for this pilgrim journey. Then the shooter stutter-stepped to the villa, followed by a second man.

Who were they? What had brought them to this place? Had the Iranians been following Karim all along, with Harry too blind to see their footprints?

The two mystery men entered the villa by a different entrance from the one the others had used. A half minute later, there was a flash of light from the building, as if something had exploded inside, and later more sparks of light, as if from gunshots. Harry kept muttering to himself as he watched the play unfold. It was horrifying to witness these events after the fact without being able to affect them, or to understand fully what was happening.

Eventually two figures emerged from the villa. One looked to be Jackie, dressed in her chador, and the other was surely Karim. Had Jackie shot her way out? What had happened to the other people inside? And then a third man emerged, following them—but no, he was leading them toward his black sedan.

It was the shooter, the gimpy man who had killed Hakim and executed the Turkmen driver. He prodded Jackie and Karim toward the sedan and waved them inside. He spoke a word to the driver, and then the black sedan was gone—beginning its journey to the border at Kalat, Harry knew. And the lone man, the shooter, was left there with what had to be four dead bodies.

“Who the
fuck
is that guy?” muttered Harry. He was speaking to himself. And in truth, he thought he knew the answer. But it was Marcia Hill who answered.

“That’s Al-Majnoun,” said Marcia. “The Crazy One.”

Marcia didn’t want to
talk about it in front of the NRO techs. She was strange that way. After a career at the CIA, she didn’t really trust anyone, least of all other members of the U.S. intelligence community. So she waited until they were safely back in Persia House before she said any more. She padded to her cubicle and returned with a file folder and a pack of cigarettes.

“Give me one,” he said.

“But you don’t smoke, Harry.”

“I just started. Now tell me about Al-Majnoun.”

Marcia took a photograph out of the folder. It was a grainy shot of a man whose face looked like it had been drawn with a haphazard Etch A Sketch.

“
This
is Al-Majnoun,” she said. “I know it’s a crappy picture, but it’s the best one we have of him, version 2.0, or 3.0, or whatever this is.”

She removed a second photograph from the folder. It showed a younger man, someone who, from the image in the photograph, appeared to be entirely different from the dark and disfigured man in the first shot.

“This is Al-Majnoun, version 1.0. Or at least that’s what some of my Israeli friends think. These are their photographs. His name back then in Lebanon was Kamal Hussein Sadr. He was one of the first people the Iranians pulled into what became Hezbollah. He was a wholly owned subsidiary of Iranian intelligence, from the start. They used him as an enforcer. When they didn’t trust one of their own people, he took care of it.”

“Why don’t we know about him?”

“Because he was killed, supposedly. In 1985, by the Israelis. They were patting themselves on the back for months. Car bomb, body blown to bits in Baalbek so they couldn’t ID him afterward. But seriously dead, everyone thought. So everyone forgot about him. Except for a few skeptical SOBs at Mossad. And me.”

“What happened to him?”

“He went to Iran. In 1985, after the Israeli hit that almost got him. Personal invitation of Khomeini. So it was said, if anyone bothered to listen to the chatter, which no one did because the Israelis had killed him and the Israelis never make mistakes. But he was there. He knew he would need a new face if he was going to stay undead. So the surgeon’s healing arts were applied. They put so much new skin on this guy, they probably gave him a new dick, too.”

“Get a life, Marcia.”

“Bit late for that. Anyway, when you run the traces—meaning Marcia’s private traces, because honestly, honey, the main registry is useless—what you find is that Mr. Majnoun kept doing special jobs. Super Wet Work. When a dissident faction surfaced in the Rev Guard in the early nineties and people got revolverized, guess who pulled the trigger? When Rafsanjani had a problem with the Ministry of Intelligence and a few people got knocked off, who got the call?”

“The Crazy One.”

“But of course. He was the cleanup guy. Nobody owned him, you see, except the Leader’s office. And check this out.”

She took a third photograph from her file. It showed a tidy little man with a neat beard standing in front of an airplane. In the shadows behind him was a man in sunglasses, with the Identi-Kit face.

“This is the president getting off a plane in Damascus. Secret trip, never announced. The Israelis got the picture. The official Mossad line was that the messed-up-looking guy in the shades was just some fixer who was traveling with the president. But my pals down in the boiler room in Tel Aviv knew better. This is Al-Majnoun. The Leader’s personal enforcer. The man who doesn’t exist. And, I am sorry to say, the man who took down your operation.”

“You are one crazy old bitch.” Harry leaned across the table and kissed her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“But you’re wrong about one thing. I don’t think Al-Majnoun ran this Mashad operation for the Leader of Iran. He did it for someone else.”

Harry had a last,
agonizing piece of the puzzle, and he didn’t understand it until after midnight, when he was about ready to go home. The remaining mystery was the identity of the second man who had entered the villa with Al-Majnoun but had never left. He appeared to be the shooter’s accomplice, but who was he? Was he also part of a secret cell, operating under the protection of the Leader? Or did he represent other parts of the Iranian secret world?

An answer surfaced in urgent liaison reports that arrived from two friendly services that had been apprised of Langley’s hunger for fresh rumint about anything involving Iranian intelligence.

The first was from the little spy service of Azerbaijan, which had a surprisingly good network, thanks to the large Azeri community in Iran. The cable from Baku reported that senior officers of the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence service had been spotted the day before at the funeral of one of their colleagues—a certain Mehdi Esfahani, who was said to have been a senior investigator with responsibility for security at some of the covert facilities of the Iranian nuclear program. There had been a long reception afterward, at the family’s home. The talk was that Esfahani had died in Mashad—the body had been flown back home in great secrecy, and that it had been riddled with bullet holes. The family had been told he died a hero’s death, and a special martyr’s pension had been approved.

The second overnight report was from French intelligence. It, too, had a few long-standing sources within Iranian intelligence. The head of the French service, a contact of Harry’s since they had been in Beirut together years ago, made a point of calling himself, even though it was just past seven in the morning in Paris. He said he was transmitting a flash cable that might be of interest to his old friend
Har-ry Pap-pas.
And indeed it was.

The French reported that commanders of the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence, the Etelaat-e Sepah, had been briefed the previous day on a top-secret operation. The chief had explained to his elite cadres that thanks to the service’s dedicated efforts, especially the heroic action of martyr Mehdi Esfahani, the Guard had foiled a plot by Western agencies to steal Iran’s nuclear secrets. A traitor who worked at the facility known as Tohid Electrical Company had been killed; so had his accomplice, who worked in Mashad at the facility known as Ardebil Research Establishment. The organizer of this operation was the Little Satan, Great Britain, whose operatives had been killed while trying to organize the escape of the Iranian traitors. Behind Britain stood the Great Satan, whose perfidy and incompetence had once more been exposed. The Guard was taking appropriate action to discover any other participants in this conspiracy. Fortunately, thanks to their prompt action, the integrity of the Iranian nuclear program as a whole was certain.

There it was. Everything Harry Pappas could have wanted, packaged with a neat ribbon by an Iranian intelligence service that was as eager as Harry’s own agency to cover its backside when it had made a very big mistake. What pleased Harry most was that the Iranians really didn’t seem to understand just how serious their problem was.

It was past 2:00 a.m. when Harry finally drove his Jeep Cherokee out of the parking lot and went home to sleep for a few hours before he went to see the director.

The admiral was at
the White House for the morning briefing and yet another “deep dive” with the president about terrorism, so he didn’t get back to Langley until nine-thirty. Harry had asked the security guard on the seventh floor, whose son went to the school in Fairfax where Andrea taught, to call him as soon as the boss returned. That allowed Harry to stick his head in the admiral’s door moments after the boss had set down his big briefcase and straightened his blue zip-up navy jacket on the hanger, and before the strokers and time-wasters who were assembled in the anteroom could begin their daily assault. The secretary made a pro forma attempt to stop Harry, but the door was open and she liked him better than the others, anyway.

“Got a minute, sir?” asked Harry.

“Where the hell have you been? A lot of people are looking for you.”

“That’s kind of a long story, sir. It’s going to take a few minutes. May I close the door?”

Harry didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed the door firmly shut, just in time to block the way of the general counsel, who had been apprised that the FBI’s new poster boy was on the seventh floor.

“You are in deep water, shipmate. Do you know that the Bureau was over here this week? They want to open a criminal investigation on you.”

“For what? If I’m allowed to ask.”

“Espionage, treason. Hell, I don’t know. They seem to think that you have been operating as an agent of a foreign power, whose capital is London. On some Iranian caper. Is that true?”

“Yes, sir, more or less. I told you I was going to contact the Brits. They had the assets in Iran and we didn’t. Remember? We talked about it.”

The admiral shrugged. He was wearing a white shirt that had his gold stars on a neat board attached to the epaulettes. They looked like little shoulder pads.

“I don’t know what I remember. I’ll have to talk to the general counsel. But you, Harry, you had better get a lawyer. The FBI is serious. The deputy director spent an hour with me. They have some tipster in London who is shitting all over you. Names, dates, photographs. Someone has set you up, my friend.”

“Yes, sir. I know. You don’t know the half of it, actually. But as you say, that’s my problem. I’ll sort it out.”

The admiral looked relieved. He absentmindedly took another of his endless supply of ship models from the front of his desk. This time it was an Aegis-class guided missile cruiser. The admiral turned it over so that he could look at the underside of the hull, as if checking for barnacles.

“Good. Well, I wish legal problems were your only difficulty, but they’re not. The White House is ready to pop on Iran. I have been holding them off the past two weeks, as I promised you I would—I do remember that—but they have run out of patience. I got an earful from Stewart Appleman this morning. They are ready to go public, with everything. Damn the consequences.”

“And what will the White House do then?” asked Harry.

“An embargo of Iran, sea and air. If the Iranians resist, they’ll bomb. They’re going to announce the embargo in three days. Bombing is just a matter of time, I reckon.”

“But they don’t need to bomb anything. The Iranian program is falling apart. They don’t know which end is up. They’re shitting bricks in Tehran. That’s what I came here to tell you. We should just let them self-destruct. An American attack is the only thing that will save them. You know that.”

“Sorry, not my department. I don’t do policy.”

“But you’re the CIA director.”

“So? That doesn’t count for much, if you hadn’t noticed. But why are you so sure the Iranian program is falling apart? Did you get that from your agent Dr. Ali?”

“He’s dead. That’s part of what I came to tell you. He died a hero, truly. And he did something so sweet before he died that the Iranians shouldn’t be able to run a glow-in-the-dark watch for a while, let alone build a nuclear weapon.”

The director put down the Aegis ship model.

“Uh, perhaps you had better explain, Harry.” He buzzed his secretary and told her that he wasn’t to be disturbed until he said otherwise, and when she asked if that even meant the general counsel, who was practically beating down the door, he said that it meant especially the general counsel.

So Harry told the
story of what he had been doing over the past several weeks, leaving out only the parts that would get him into irreparable legal jeopardy, and the parts involving Kamal Atwan, which he intended to handle on his own. He described his operational planning with Adrian Winkler at SIS to get Dr. Ali out of Iran for debriefing. He explained how the team from the Increment was recruited and sent in to exfiltrate Dr. Ali so that Harry could meet him in Turkmenistan. He explained bits and pieces of the sabotage operation—telling the director enough so he could understand that Dr. Ali’s messages really had been a confirmation not that the Iranian program was succeeding, but that it was failing. And why.

And finally, Harry described what had happened a few days before in Mashad. The CIA’s agent—the brave young scientist whose real name was Karim Molavi—had agreed to go back into the heart of the Iranian nuclear beast to sabotage a secret outpost that was Iran’s ace in the hole. He had died on his way out, along with all the members of the British team. But as near as Harry could tell, Molavi had succeeded in his mission. Iran’s only clean hardware had now been contaminated, too. They wouldn’t know what, if anything, to trust.

Whatever the Iranians did now in their nuclear program, they would make mistakes. Their most senior intelligence officials had been humiliated. It would take them years to recover. The chatter in Tehran showed that they were trying desperately to explain and cover up what had happened. All the United States government needed to do now was put a few more details on the record, and the disaster would be complete.

The admiral was wide-eyed
as he listened to Harry’s account. He didn’t appreciate all the nuances. He was a boat driver, not a spy. But he liked what he heard, and by the time Harry was finished, he was actually smiling. And then he was frowning again.

“This won’t convince the White House to stop,” said the director. “They will just say that it’s more proof the Iranians are a threat. They had a secret weapons program, and a backup, too.”

“But it’s ruined now. It’s shot. We don’t have to bomb anything.”

“Harry, my friend, some people like to bomb. It makes them feel like they have a strategy, when they send the military in.”

Harry paused. He picked up one of the models on the director’s desk. It was a Navy F/A-18 bomber, one of the planes that would be used to attack targets in Iran, if it came to that.

“Well, sir, I’m not playing.”

“What do you mean, Harry? You have to play. You’re an American. You work for an agency that is an arm of the president.”

“Nope. I’m off the team. I want to retire. As soon as possible. That’s the other thing I came to tell you.”

“What about the FBI?”

“They’ll go away eventually. The FBI likes to make trouble for the agency, but even they will realize that this case is a loser. Someone is pulling their chain, so they’re pulling mine. But that will stop.”

The director squinted at him. “Who’s pulling the chain?”

“I think it’s a certain Arab gentleman. You don’t want to know the details, sir. Believe me. Let me worry about it. It’s safer that way.”

The director nodded, but he was still unconvinced. “So what do you get, Harry? Do you just crawl in a hole when this is done?”

“I want to retire,” Harry repeated. “I’ve had it. I’m busted. I lost my son, and then I lost this boy. I still have time for my daughter, if I’m not stupid. I don’t want to do this work anymore. That’s my only condition, actually. I want to retire, as soon as the paperwork clears. I don’t want to keep my clearances. I don’t want any of it. It’s over.”

The director shook his head. “You Greeks are weird. You know that? All the drama, and then, poof, there it goes. Good seamen though. That counts for something.”

Harry Pappas left the
director’s office and went back to the dingy first floor and Persia House. The Imam Hussein had never looked so lachrymose; his eyes were weeping blood. Harry summoned Marcia Hill and explained what he had told the director. And he told her that he would be leaving again.

“And where will you be, Harry darling, if I may ask?”

“I’ll be away. I have to take another little trip. After that, I’ll really be away.”

“How really is really?”

“Live at the summer house all year round. That kind of really.”

Marcia wagged a nicotine-stained finger at him.

“You’re quitting, aren’t you? You miserable bastard. How dare you quit before me. That is unforgivable. After all we’ve been through, I at least deserve to be the one to say ‘fuck you’ first. And now I have to stay around and clean up after you. Typical.”

She walked back to her cubicle muttering to herself, leaving Harry alone with the dewy-eyed martyr.

After he left the
office at midday to head once more for the airport, Harry placed a call to London, to Sir David Plumb, direct. He reached him at his club. Harry said that the British had another twenty-four hours to do whatever they were planning. After that it would be too late.