The Minders (2 page)

*  *  *

Once Bobby was deep into his slumber, the cabbie picked up his cell phone. “I have him. He’s asleep and I’m bringing him in.”

Colorado
|
Two Days Later

In a wealthy suburb of Denver, at the beginning of a very long private road, was a tall modern gate, spanning two brick columns. The gate was made of thick bars, painted in a black matte finish with six-inch gaps. To be safe, they placed in-ground mechanical barriers on the other side of the gate. No one could crash the gate. Seated in a remarkably modern gatehouse, was a large man with piercing eyes, broad shoulders, brawny arms, holstering a gun on his belt. Cameras followed every move. From the gatehouse, a long curving road took you to the main house. 

The drive took you through a lush forested property, over rolling hills, and finally up a hill, which then opened to a spectacular home designed with two offset, crescent-shaped levels. On the inside curved edge, each level had floor to ceiling seamless glass walls that dimmed at a flick of a switch, from clear, to white or dark grey. Technology was embedded everywhere, inside and out. Each family member had a digital ID pin that triggered his or her favorite ambient music. The pins adjusted temperature ranges, unlocked doors and cabinets, and displayed varying digital artwork, as they moved throughout the house. The inside was a combination of concrete, steel, cherry wood, modern furniture and Persian art, making for a futuristic yet warm and inviting home.

This was Mike Shams’ dream home, which he designed and built for his family, a gift to himself, after decades of hard work. He deserved it. Made to fit every wish, and purposefully nothing like the home in which he grew up back in Iran.

His childhood home back in Iran was a stuffy old house with high ceilings, classic Persian chalk and mirror plasterwork on the walls, furnished with
Louis XVI
furniture in every room, his grandfather’s house, given to his parents as a wedding gift.

Mike had hated that place. He hated the large rooms with small windows, and doors on each wall, leading to adjacent rooms, with no hallways. He hated the garish parties, with all the furniture pushed against the walls. Each party hosting a cloud of cigarette and
hookah
smoke which lingered for hours like a low hanging fog. He vividly recalled walking through the smoke in order to get to the appetizers, always centered in the middle of the room. The entire walk, elders would shower him with questions, all asking the same things.

“
How is school? What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Each question followed by some demands. “
Fetch us some fruit and some sweets! Fetch us an ashtray!
”

The personal inquiries extended just to minimize the embarrassment of asking for something. After all, the real answers hardly ever changed. Over the years, the kids would practice drastically changing the answers to see who would remember and how the answers would travel the gossip grapevine. Answers varied, from surgeon to garbage-man and from doctor to a mother of seven. 

However, the most amusing aspect of those parties were the cultural seating priorities, with elders in the more comfortable seats at the upper section of the room, and the younger guests, on the hard narrow wooden seats, at the lower part of the room. The arrangement optimized the greeting process as each new guest arrived. The rule was, greet the eldest first, working your way down the age ladder. Stop at your station and wait for the younger to greet you.

Imagine if they all sat around randomly, you would be bouncing all around the room, even if you remembered everyone’s age. Speaking of age, that too became an interesting aspect as some ladies would insist on a lower seat just to lower their age, which would ensue into amusing ribbings and some public betrayals as one would loudly call out an age or date of birth. 

Finally, given limited seats, this was an understood reservation system. Should an elder get up to get something, her chair would remain empty, unless an even older person needed to sit. Therefore, the oldest person had a guaranteed secure chair, with the odds decreasing as you got younger. They made your life hell if you greeted out of order, or even worse, if you forgot to greet someone. Decades later, some still summoned social errors, thrashing them about as the worst kind of betrayal.

“
Do you remember that one year when you sat in your Uncle’s chair?”
They would ruminate with pleasure given how you made a fool of yourself those days long ago.

It was not all bad. There was great entertainment value. The lower part had the best jokes, whereas the upper part had the best political discussions. As it turned out, both were useless, but quite fun to indulge. A child had to learn to navigate a room to minimize silly conversations and maximize the take. In the end though, the socialization lessons became very useful in Mike’s career, helping him network at each trade convention and architecture show. Mike was both genetically predisposed and trained in the art of small talk, glad-handing and pressing the flesh.

*  *  *

In his new house, Mike built a sanctuary room and office combination. It was the perfect place to relax on his Sundays off. He had pictures of his family, his award winning projects, and some beautiful Persian miniatures all smartly placed on the walls. On one side sat an intricately carved walnut desk looking out and onto his well-manicured gardens. To the side, a large, matching walnut file cabinet holding hundreds of design and construction projects his company had completed over decades. Placed in the middle of the room was a coffee table, a leather couch and his favorite leather chair. He angled the leather chair just right so he could see his landscaped property.

On that particular Sunday, the morning sun was beaming across the room, warming the leather chair, a perfect invitation to sit. His reading glasses were on the coffee table, next to the newspaper, awaiting his arrival.

Mike, the founder and CEO of Towers Construction, banned all calls and messages on Sundays until well after noon, no exceptions. Running a multi-billion dollar construction company took so much of his time. He had no choice but to lay down the law, on his one and only day of rest, or more accurately a three-hour break. He needed that time to reflect, a mental and physical escape from his daily work routine, a way to replenish his emotional currency.

He finally arrived in his office and softly snapped in his chair, like two Lego pieces. He had his drink, an aromatic cup of black tea, with a splash of rose water, and two cubes of sugar melting away. He reached for his glasses, putting them on as he took a sip of tea, fogging up the glasses. He grabbed the paper, while wiping the steam off his glasses. He methodically separated the sections he liked and discarded the rest. The sports section was in the recycle bin along with the ads. Although his construction company built three of the largest Super Domes in the U.S., he had very little interest in reading about sports. Ironic he thought. As always, he made sure to keep all the sections crisp and orderly for later reading by his wife, Parisa.

Deep into an article, and enjoying his tea, he heard a knock. Looking up, slightly annoyed with eyeglasses at the tip of his nose, he saw Parisa at the door.

“Honey, your cell phone keeps beeping!” She walked in and handed him the phone.

“Thanks love.” Placing the paper down, he grabbed the phone.

It must have been an emergency. He saw a text message, from a local number he did not recognize. He opened the message. It read,

Watch the video. follow the link. Do not talk to anyone.

Leaning back in his chair, he took another sip of his tea. The video loaded and he began to watch, seconds into it, the teacup fell on to the Persian carpet, splashing everywhere, covering the carpet and parts of the cherry wood floor. His heart dropped, weighing him down, sinking him deep into the chair. He could not move. He felt weak and powerless.

Overcome with fear and despair he could not hear a single word. All he saw was his youngest child Bobby tied to a chair. The boy’s lips were quivering, saying something. He watched, over and over, finally he heard Bobby’s faint gasping voice.

“
Dad … help me … they’ve taken me … I don’t know why!
”

*  *  *

Half a day earlier in Copenhagen, Finland, the World Health Organization (WHO) liaison to the United Nations for Vaccines and Biologicals received a similar text message. A message from a local number read the same as Mike’s, but in her video, she saw her husband and daughter tied to chairs. The child was bound but unharmed, while the husband had been beaten, bruised, and in obvious pain as he spoke.

In Palo Alto, a week earlier, a Stanford Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. graduate received a letter inviting him to join a new stealth start-up, offering great pay and benefits.

In Denver, Colorado, the head of City & County Permits & Projects, received a text stating his gambling debts were due immediately, no exceptions, and no extensions.

Tehran, Iran
|
Three Months Earlier

The business park, one of a few in Tehran, was a bustling eco-system that could survive on its own. A mix of retail stores, eateries, clothing stores, repair shops, dry cleaners, and electronic stores, occupied the bottom floors, and above them all, the professional businesses. Surrounding the buildings were green parks and walking paths. Rare community-oriented and green business parks were becoming more popular given the persistent congestion, smog and traffic issues.

Surrounding the park perimeter were your typical metropolitan high rises, crammed together, each racing to the sky. The nearby subway station was pumping people out as fast as it sucked them in, a continual cycle of walking drones, similar to ants on a mission before winter hit.

Situated in the middle of this business park, was
The Cultural Center
. The facilities were built to be indistinguishable from all the others buildings in the park. Although on closer inspection, it was nothing like any of the other buildings. It had no retail stores. The entire building contained one entity,
The Center
. There was but one public way in, the main entrance. It was the only building with a dedicated parking lot, an extreme scarcity in a city with over eight million residents, where all public parking lots were first-come-first-serve. There were no side entrances, nor were there any receiving platforms.

Looking even more closely, you could see additional clues as to how different this place was. The windows were layered panes with a gel-filling, bullet proof and definitely soundproof. The corners of each window showed subtle signs of electronic sound and vibration masking, preventing laser eavesdropping and frequency leakage. The parking lot had magnetic card and license plate readers, which would then trigger the two-ton sliding gate to open. The walls surrounding the parking area were twelve feet tall and made of concrete.

For most if not all others, it looked like a typical cultural center found in almost every city in the
Islamic Republic of Iran
. It was but one of three satellite offices to Tehran’s main cultural center, and the only one that had little to do with culture.

On the inside, the differences became even more glaring. The building was a technological and security marvel, every inch masked from floors to ceilings, to deter eavesdropping. The tech group even offered portable masking kits for meetings at client sites. The computer systems were as high-end as possible. They assembled all servers and desktops in house, in order to assure untainted hardware and software. They sourced components from a variety of vendors, from many different countries. All items eventually made it to this facility, for inspections, checked for any malicious code and for integrated backdoors. All machines were void of USB ports or CD drives dissuading all data transfers. All software was custom or open source, which they further modified and compiled on site.

Each employee had a clone-proof, cryptographic RFID chip, with rolling codes, implanted in their arm. The chip allowed for access to sections, rooms, files and computers, as their project or role required. RFID rights management avoided all the pitfalls of lost, stolen, and expired keycards. Not to mention, the dangling of key-cards as one walked off premise. There was no need to draw attention or to point the finger at oneself.

Employees entered the building through the unassuming main lobby or from the private parking lot. They continued to a secondary, closed processing area, where they walked through special body scanners, on the way in and out. Across from the scanner was a large black metal disposal box. You did not leave with any disks, documents, or files, for risk of thermal incineration. Phones were often and randomly confiscated, checked for photos and scanned files, and delivered to their owners sometime during the following day. All frequencies were jammed whilst on the inside. Unauthorized communications never came in or out of The Center.

Most astonishing of all was the use of languages. Center employees and agents could not speak or use Farsi, the national language, in the building. The only exceptions were in the main lobby, the accounting and the administration offices. All of which were located on the front facing section of the main floor. In all other areas, the only allowable languages were any two or more of a set of foreign languages, with English a mandatory language.

For the people working here,
The Center
had nothing to do with culture, but everything to do with advancement, power and influence. It contained some of the country’s most valuable intellectual property, both in tangible designs and deliverables. Moreover, it oversaw those people, globally, who had created them. They collected, for each of those people, all information about them, their weaknesses, strengths, career paths, relationships, friends, family, assets, and locations; not to mention any information that could help in manipulating or influencing them. They catalogued, indexed and stored them all. This was Iran’s largest and oldest Big Data project, in the truest sense of the concept.

*  *  *

The Center was one of many replacements of the SAVAK, the original Iranian Secret Police and Intelligence Services, which
was founded with help from the CIA. From 1957 to 1979, it focused exclusively on Iranians within Iran, and was the most hated and feared institution for torturing its citizens. In stark contrast, The Center focused exclusively on Iranian expats and their children, outside of Iran, collectively known as ‘The Watched’, where it opportunistically and secretly raised the value of the people it watched. The Center was a collection of analysts, highly educated professionals, and field agents, known as ‘The Minders.’

At the beginning of the 1979 revolution, SAVAK disbanded, with departments and infrastructure converting into a new internal security and spying organization. One offshoot group became dedicated to expats. The original group tracked who left Iran. As more people left, it became clear that the magnitude of that brain drain was catastrophic. That vast knowledge and expertise was to be lost to other countries forever. Something had to either stop or recapture that loss.

Hessam Rezadad, an up and coming commander in SAVAK, educated in the U.S. and fluent in several languages, became Project Architect and Strategist. Eventually he became the top man at The Center, now numbering in the thousands, with revenues in the billions of dollars.

Rezadad’s vision, from the start, was to create one of the world’s most sophisticated big data projects, keeping track of every person, with the ability to help, manipulate, or destroy the paths on which he or she traveled. He developed a culture of immersion. The Center hired only those who themselves had been educated abroad, were not Islamists, were well cultivated, felt comfortable in foreign lands, and who could blend seamlessly into varying cultures.

The Center believed in matching their people with the ebb and flow of the future world in which they had to live and work, as such, the language requirements. No one was to use Farsi to communicate while at The Center. The mandatory language was English, and at minimum one of the following: Mandarin, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, French, or German. Everyone working at The Center was wholly fluent in his or her chosen languages, with no accents whatsoever.

The Center library contained digitized local magazines from all around the world. Reading country-specific local rags, would help acclimate them to cultural and language nuances. It helped to adjust to living and working in those countries. Deep cultural immersion assured a low profile, better decision-making, and the avoidance of major strategic and tactical errors. Such errors had recurred repeatedly by western failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Middle East over decades. Underestimating his opponents, at any level, was not an accusation Rezadad wished to hear, ever.

As much as it benefited him and his organization to see the bearded Iranian politicians roaming the political halls of the world, and listening to their asinine speeches filled with religious diatribe and factual denials, Rezadad hated the way it portrayed his people around the world. He hated to see the world perceive his people, the same as the rest of the region, as rag-headed peasants, living in caves, and eating dates by the oasis near grazing camels. Then again, this sad visual was what allowed him to succeed beyond any of his dreams. The more normal and accepted his minders were and the more different they seemed from the crazies portrayed on Fox news, the better it was for The Center. The best place to hide was in plain sight, holding a bottle of beer, talking smack about sports and politics, a favorite American pastime.

So successful were they that the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council of the Constitution
had renewed their approval of The Center year after year, even though they violated many tenets of
Sharia
law, and whose tactics the Assembly of Experts fully opposed. The Assembly had noted and documented well over three thousand violations over the decades. However, given The Center’s protected status, many agents avoided mandatory punishment including floggings by copper wire and in some cases execution by hanging. Nevertheless, success and privilege came at a price. Occasionally the president, under executive order, would use The Center’s knowledgebase and resources to make tactical or strategic moves against other countries, during war or peace.

As distasteful as that was, it was non-negotiable, and about which few at The Center knew, but which occurred more often than not.

*  *  *

The remainder of the main floor and above was where the data-entry, logistics, banking, international law, program management and R&D floors were located. All departments either started projects, ran projects, or finished them, encasing The Watched, in order to optimize their short, medium and long-term value. Everything was project-driven and managed within a portfolio. There were no hierarchies, and everyone worked within and moved around a well-defined matrix structure. There was no one functional head to that beast.

*  *  *

Level B1

The Center’s main conference room was large, well-stocked with drinks and snacks, and filled with varying and comfortable seating arrangements, breakout rooms, and phone rooms. During the day, light tubes and mirrors brought sunlight across the entire space. At night, LED wall lights illuminated every inch of space with a warm white hue. There were dozens of lit monitors, buzzing and hanging on three walls. Data was scrolling across each screen in colors, all of which meant something to someone. A glass wall, covering the entire long edge of the room, faced the twenty thousand square foot server room and cooling towers. The server room expanded beyond the floor plan above and under the parking lot. Servers, floor to ceiling, were blinking like a nighttime cityscape. Every so often, you could hear the ever so faint humming of the backup generators outside on the backside of the main floor above, enclosed in the parking lot, a must have piece of equipment for those random and ever-present blackouts. Each time power went out for the rest of the people in Tehran, a slight flicker of light and a second later all was well again on this floor.

Level B2

They had reserved that level for special guests.

*  *  *

On a weekly basis, in the main conference room, the business-intelligence group leaders analyzed the weekly simulation reports, project probabilities and forecasts, and reviewed delivery and value assurance reports on existing projects. In this room, new vectors died or came to life. Each new vector, numbered sequentially, would become either a one-off project or a continuous endeavor.

Vector #12 was the longest running project to date, and involved all manner of legitimate local and international money making schemes. Early on, Rezadad decided The Center’s scope would be so vast that it needed to support itself. In addition, it must have means by which funds moved globally to support other vectors. This vector portfolio had under its umbrella, hedge funds, venture funds, small banks, brokerage firms, real-estate firms, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, biotechs, and numerous other businesses, in over 30 countries.

Vector #15 was one of the most interesting. Its sole purpose was to manipulate or accelerate the path on which The Watched travelled. Rezadad envisioned helping to position them in better and higher roles in their respective careers. On the legitimate side, it supported scholarships, educational programs, and training in all areas of science, technology, engineering, business, and medicine. On the darker side, it helped manipulate others through bribes and coercion, to select, promote or otherwise make decisions favoring a particular candidate.

Vectors #1 to #10 were highly classified with few having knowledge of any details.

*  *  *

It was a typical start to the weekly meeting. It was early, with the smell of coffee and tea wafting through the air. Rezadad came in, chose a seat at random and sat, with a dark red Darjeeling tea in hand, emanating a rose water aura in the trailing steam. 

“Let’s start with the visa applications.” He began, taking a long sip.

It was important to know who was visiting Iran. This was a great source of intelligence from both the willing and the not so willing visitor. Most cleared customs with ease. A select few had to endure a longer Q&A session, all the while having their phones cloned, and their electronic equipment reconfigured. Center agents would upgrade every computer BIOS or system with an exploit and copy all hard drives for later decryption and access. They would install a new battery for some laptops, containing specialized microchips, firmware and embedded Wi-Fi in the casing. They would tag all devices while the guest sat patiently, nervously, angry and at times scared, in adjoining waiting rooms. After a long wait, guests received a box of Persian sweets, as an apology, and sent on their merry way.