The Natanz Directive (6 page)

“Done,” he answered. “What's the terrain like?” By this he meant the danger level.

“Pretty flat right now. But I'm on for tea in the afternoon.” This confirmed my meeting with the MEK's leadership in two hours. “I'm going on a walkabout after this call.”

“Good. Keep me posted. Anything else?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Then I'm out.” The call disconnected and the screen went blank.

I composed the e-mail and forwarded the information on Atash Morshed. The NSA had decades of practice tunneling into banking operations, but even their supercomputers would take time. I'd check on their progress later.

I didn't want to talk to Deputy Director of Operations Otto Wiseman, so I sent him a voice text. Three words:
See Tom Run
. In other words, “Talk to General Tom Rutledge. He'll give you an update.”

Last but not least, I sent a text to Roger Anderson, my longtime contact here in Holland. It read:
On track. Drinks at ten.
This confirmed our rendezvous at a dive bar we both knew called Tracks at 1800, two hours earlier than my message suggested. His reply was instantaneous:
With bells on.

After closing the communication links and the associated apps, I put my Jerry Garcia cap back on, hitched my pack over my shoulder, and went outside for a recon of the area. I strolled in what seemed an aimless pattern along the canals and made my way toward the center of Amsterdam. I did a couple of tourist things. I bought coffee from one street vendor and a braut from another. But it was all for show. I was on the prowl, vigilant, wary, suspicious of even the most ordinary of details. So I spotted the two guys following me fairly quickly.

They were good. Not great, but good. Did that make them MEK or DDO or someone else? I couldn't tell.

I ducked into a pub and headed to the men's room with my backpack. I swapped my hoodie for a blue golf jacket, my denim cap for a khaki hat with a floppy brim, and the mirrored sunglasses for tortoise-shell wraparounds. I stared at myself in the mirror. It was a simple but effective change, from stoner to tourist.

I used the back door and walked halfway down the alley. I entered a second pub via the kitchen, gave a nod to a startled chef, and ordered a glass of Rauchbier from the bar. I carried it out to an empty table on the outdoor patio and slouched in a chair. I sipped the beer, toyed with my iPhone, and watched the people coming my way.

The two men strolled on the adjacent sidewalk. They had glossy black hair, swarthy complexions, and trim beards; definitely Middle Eastern, but Amsterdam was replete with them. Their gazes swept the patio and passed over me. One of them was talking on a cell phone as they passed by.

He was speaking Persian. Mine was still a little rusty, but I understood him when he said, “We've lost him.…”

 

CHAPTER 6

AMSTERDAM—DAY FOUR

I watched the two men halt at the entrance to the pub's patio.

The one with the cell phone was doing more listening than talking now, which meant that someone was not real happy. The questions I was asking myself were pretty straightforward. Who did these guys work for? And who was giving them hell right now on the other end of the phone?

I'd been tag-teaming with a couple of Wiseman's Amsterdam agents since I'd arrived, and they were waiting for my call in the lobby of the Amsterdam Hilton. So I felt relatively confident in assuming that these two were not more of Wiseman's men; and that if they were, then the deputy director of operations was not playing it straight with me.

I had to assume they were MEK. If so, I had a problem. My meeting with the MEK leadership wasn't for another hour and twenty minutes, and the location hadn't even been confirmed yet.

The two men passed through the patio and entered the pub. I put my glass of beer on the patio table and left. I crossed the street and watched the pub from inside a souvenir shop. I scanned both sides of the avenue, checking for signs of a second team: a shadow checking to see if the first team was being shadowed, so to speak. This was typical overkill in the cloak-and-dagger business; if you didn't know if you were being tailed, then you shouldn't be in the business. Fortunately, these two were alone.

They reappeared outside the pub less than a minute later, looking confused and pissed. The taller of the pair made another call on his cell phone. I took three pictures of the pair with my iPhone for later reference and waited.

It was a short call and very one-sided. The two hurried away from the pub and headed north. I stepped out of the souvenir shop. When they were halfway down the block and had put a good number of pedestrians between us, I started after them. They were still on the hunt, heads swiveling, peering into every storefront, stopping at every intersection and gazing down every alley.

I stayed with them, a half block behind, wary of the possibility that they could be leading me into a trap. At Bloedstraat, they turned left. Here the street narrowed through a residential neighborhood restricted to foot traffic and bicycles, and there were plenty of both. The tightly packed apartment buildings made this place way too convenient for an ambush. I watched their progress from the end of the street. I had no intention of venturing forward until I was dead certain of what they were doing.

Ten seconds later, they turned left at the cross street and disappeared around the corner. I plunged down the avenue. This was the kind of street the tourists never saw, which meant they never really saw the heart and soul of the city. The scent of baking bread filled my nostrils. A neon sign flashed over the door to an apothecary. I heard laughter.

I was a dozen paces from the cross street when an older-model Volvo sedan sputtered into view. I could see the shorter of the pair at the wheel. His taller partner rode shotgun.

I got to the cross street just as the car sped up. I had just enough time to memorize the license tag and take a second photo with my phone before the car was gone, lost in the chaos of traffic. Not that either the photo or the license-plate number would be of any value.

An hour earlier, I had been certain that I had arrived in Amsterdam unnoticed. Now I was high-profile on someone's radar. I wasn't particularly eager to return to my hotel room, but leaving my backpack was not an option. Bad move leaving it there in the first place, and now I had to risk going back. I made a call to the front desk and asked for the head bellhop. In my experience, there was very little a bellhop wouldn't do for twenty American dollars, and this one delivered my backpack and duffel bag to the loading dock out back of the hotel for exactly that price.

I kept a list of additional safe houses in my iPhone. My backup was a tiny apartment in Hartenstraat. The landlord knew me only as an American businessman who insisted on privacy during his sporadic visits to the city. I sent a text asking if my room was available. Moments later, he answered that it was. Good. Maybe things were looking up.

I walked the several blocks to Hartenstraat and scoped the neighborhood, a strip of shops and apartments crowded together on opposite sides of the street. All clear.

The front door to the safe house was tucked between a women's clothing boutique and a bakery. I tapped the entry code into an electronic lock beside the entrance, let myself into the tiny foyer, and shut the door behind me. I paused at the bottom of the stairs. I listened to every sound. There was only the chatter of people passing by on the walk outside, the ring of a bicycle bell, and the echo of a television on the first floor. Nothing else.

A row of mailboxes hung from the foyer wall. I turned the tumbler lock on the mailbox assigned to my apartment, opened it, and removed the room key stored inside.

*   *   *

My room was second to the left on the landing. Standing to one side of the door, I slipped the key into the dead bolt and turned the key until the lock snapped open. I listened for the rustle of clothing, the shifting of feet. Nothing.

I swung the door open and peeked inside. Again, nothing. I locked the door and activated the iPhone app that searched for surveillance bugs. Nada. I checked the rest of the apartment, the closet, under the bed, the shower stall. The upside was that the bathroom was stocked with toiletries; the downside was that I wouldn't be here long enough to use them.

I threw a couple of pillows against the headboard of the bed, got as comfortable as I intended to get, and scrolled through my incoming messages. General Tom Rutledge wanted a videoconference ASAP. Had to be about the online banker Atash Morshed and his Iranian connections. I sent my reply:
Ready now.

I stared at the phone for nearly a minute before the conference-call app beeped. I held the iPhone up to my face. Tom's visage appeared. He was in full dress uniform, and I wondered why. A fruit salad of ribbons decorated his left breast pocket, and three silver stars glittered on each of his shoulders.

He said, “Sit rep?” Rushed. Even a little harried. Interesting.

“My situation is this. I was shadowed earlier today by two Middle Eastern types. I'm sending you their photo right now.” I transmitted the image and waited.

“Got it. Hold on. I'm doing an NSA cross-check,” Tom said. I waited again, counting the seconds off and betting I wouldn't get to thirty. I didn't.

“The picture's coming through,” Tom said, twenty-six seconds later. His brow wrinkled as he examined the photo. “The tall guy is Kia Akbari. An MEK operative.”

“If he knew I was in Amsterdam, that means our security has a big hole.” I felt the sting of anger because someone had been careless, or worse, traitorous.

“His boss is Kouros Moradi.”

“The guy who runs the MEK cell here. The guy I'm supposed to be meeting within two hours. Not good,” I said, even though I could read Tom's expression.

Not good, but also curious. I'd dealt with Kouros Moradi a dozen times back in the old days. He was smart and crafty. Smart and crafty enough to use any opportunity to put a chink in the armor of the current Iranian regime, and he was also resourceful enough to help. That's why I was starting with him here in Amsterdam. All well and good, but it didn't change the fact that two of his guys had been following me unannounced and uninvited.

I didn't like this. A key to my survival was knowing more about the other players than they knew about me. Back in the day, this would have been enough for an agent in my position to cut bait and call the entire operation off. Retrench and regroup. But I didn't have that luxury. The clock was ticking.

“Okay. My problem. I'll take care of it. Any word on our online banker and his contacts?” I said. I was talking about Atash Morshed, the moneyman for the Iranian drug industry, and I'd assumed that's why Tom had called.

“Plenty. Didn't take much for the NSA to plow through his records. The guy's up to his gonads in drug money, and a significant part of the cash Morshed is laundering makes a beeline right into the hands of some character named Sepehr Tale.”

“Don't know him?” I said, shaking my head from side to side.

“Iran's undersecretary for economic development.”

“Economic development, my ass,” I said. The only economic development that the mullahs and The Twelver were interested in was military development, and that meant we'd scored a hit on the guy in charge of channeling drug money into the government's nuclear weapons program. “We're onto something. Good work.”

“It's a crack in the door, but it's only as good as you can make it,” he said. He was right. An official like Sepehr Tale could not be bribed or reasoned with. He was a tool of the regime. He might have believed wholeheartedly in what the mullahs were selling, but probably not. And it didn't matter. He was controlled by a single element: fear. Who knew how many men and women he had seen hung up by their necks at the end of a derrick crane. Who knew how many people he had seen die in Evin Prison. Sepehr Tale was a means to an end. A tool to be used and discarded. I looked forward to doing both. “Listen, report back after your meeting with Moradi, right?”

I said, “Right,” but by now I was working every angle, including the possibility of a loose cannon in the Pentagon, General Tom Rutledge's own backyard. I was watching his face. His gaze tightened, and his presence was so electric that it was like he had teleported into the room beside me. I almost smiled. Instead, I said, “Lay it on me.”

“This probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: everyone seems pretty darn convinced that the Iranian government and the MEK are like oil and water. Serious foes, blood enemies. All that crap. But you and I know there's a lot of overlap when it comes to agendas and loyalties. Watch yourself, okay?”

The general had it dead on. It didn't matter what side of the fence they were on—progovernment or antigovernment—they were all more or less criminals, no better really than the narco-terrorists I'd hunted for two-plus decades. I looked at the three-star general on the other end of the phone and grinned. “Keep those chest medals polished, my friend.”

“Will do.” Tom signed off.

His e-mail had come through and provided a local telephone number and a couple of recent head shots of Kouros Moradi, the MEK kingpin. He'd changed since I'd last seen him. In the first photo—probably a passport shot—he was facing the camera in a stiff pose. A deep crease down his forehead bisected unkempt eyebrows that almost touched. His wavy black hair was smoothed back and needed combing. Wide jowls met with a thick neck. A dense mustache hung beneath a proud nose. In the other photo he was looking past the camera and seemed to be walking in a hurry. It was a candid shot, grainy, as if taken from a security video. Appearances aside, I knew better than to underestimate a guy with as much influence as Moradi had in this town.

I sent him a text confirming our meeting, and we finally settled on a warehouse in the Haarlemmerbuurt district. I wanted to arrive at least an hour early, so I took a quick shower, dressed, and went downstairs and grabbed a taxi.