Damascus Countdown

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  That said, the service itself was well attended and beautiful. Dozens of stunning floral arrangements were on display, adorned with hundreds of yellow roses, Mrs. Shirazi’s favorite. Two professional violinists from the local philharmonic orchestra, apparently longtime friends of the Shirazis, played several pieces during the service, including during a slide show that featured photographs of Nasreen as a swaddled infant being held by her parents in Tehran; Nasreen standing in front of a mosque as a young girl of about ten wearing a beautiful yellow headscarf; Nasreen and Mohammad beaming on their wedding day; Nasreen holding her firstborn son; Nasreen and Mohammad being sworn in as American citizens at a courthouse in Buffalo, New York; Nasreen standing beside David when he was about ten or twelve years old in his Little League uniform, holding a baseball bat over his shoulder; and so many more.

  Most of the pictures Marseille had never seen, of course, but some she had and some had been captured in the season of life when she had first met the Shirazis, when she herself was a young girl, and they brought back very poignant memories. The one that completely caught her off guard actually showed her family and the Shirazi family gathered together for Thanksgiving when she was about ten years old, sitting around the Shirazis’ dining room table. They were all so young. None of the parents had gray hair. Neither of David’s brothers had beards. David was wearing an adorable little suit and tie. Marseille was wearing a robin’s-egg-blue dress with matching blue bows in her pigtails. She was sitting next to David, and just at the moment the photo had been snapped, she was sneaking a glance at him while he was making a silly face. She still remembered that very moment vividly. The photograph itself had hung, framed, on the wall of her father’s den for years. The sight of it instantly made Marseille’s eyes well up with tears and caused a lump to form in her throat. What a sweeter, simpler time that had been, long before the angel of death had descended upon them all—before her mother was killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center, before her father committed suicide in the woods outside their home, before Mrs. Shirazi lost her battle with cancer, before David joined the CIA and was sent inside Iran.

  As she sat in that service, she’d had to grit her teeth so as not to lose her composure. Part of her had wanted to run from the room and hide and sob. Another part of her, however, had wanted to stand up and shout the truth to everyone in the room. David isn’t here because he is serving his country! He is serving behind enemy lines in Iran. Of course he loved his mother. He loved her dearly. He would have done anything he possibly could to be in this room, but he’s probably dodging a barrage of bullets or risking his life to stop the Iranians from firing their missiles. How dare you judge him! How dare you spread your gossip and lies when you don’t have the foggiest notion of the truth!

  Marseille felt crushed by the pain David must be going through, unable to properly grieve his mother’s death or comfort his father. But she also felt angry at the whisperers in the room who had concluded that Azad and Saeed were heroes and that David was an unworthy son who couldn’t even deign to come home to his own mother’s funeral. But she couldn’t let her emotions get the better of her, she told herself.

  No one in the room knew what she knew. In trying to learn the truth about her own father’s work for the Central Intelligence Agency, she had stumbled onto the truth about who David was and what he was doing. But as much as she wanted to tell everyone—or at least tell Dr. Shirazi to ease his pain—it was not her secret to reveal. Indeed, David’s life likely depended precisely on no one else knowing what he was doing, especially his own family, and the last thing she intended to do was put him in any more danger than he already was.

  KARAJ, IRAN

  The brisk winter air on David’s face was refreshing. The pounding of the cracked pavement under his feet was a good change of pace. But nothing could lift the weight from his shoulders, and though his recent “successes” were now legendary within the Agency, he struggled to see that he had achieved anything of real substance or lasting significance thus far. People were dying. The Mideast was in flames. That wasn’t success. That was failure.

  That’s not how Langley saw it, of course. To the suits on the seventh floor of the CIA headquarters, David’s most important accomplishment had been tracking down Dr. Alireza Birjandi and developing him into an effective source. The aging scholar, professor, and bestselling author was also the world’s leading expert on Shia eschatology, widely described in the Iranian media as a spiritual mentor and senior advisor to several of the top leaders in the Iranian regime, including Ayatollah Hamid Hosseini and President Ahmed Darazi. Birjandi spoke to these leaders by phone on a regular basis. He dined with them. Occasionally they shared the state’s most prized secrets with him. They trusted him. Indeed, the elites in Iran revered Birjandi. Little did they know how intensely Birjandi had come to repudiate their theology and eschatology. Nor did they know Birjandi had a direct pipeline to the Americans. It was from Birjandi that David had learned about Iran’s eight operational warheads and that the regime had already tested one in a previously undisclosed underground facility near the city of Hamadan. And it was Birjandi who had pointed David to Dr. Najjar Malik, the highest-ranking nuclear scientist in the country.

  David had not only tracked down Malik but had persuaded him to defect and gotten him safely out of the country. With Malik’s help, David had hunted down Tariq Khan—nephew of A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Tariq, a top Pakistani nuclear scientist in his own right, had been helping the Iranians build the Bomb. At enormous risk to his own life, David had captured Tariq, forced out of him the precise location of all eight of the regime’s operational nuclear warheads, gotten that information back to Langley, and then secreted the scientist out of Iran and off to Gitmo for further interrogation.

  But so what? Khan was no longer talking, and David hadn’t had any success in tracking down Jalal Zandi, Khan’s partner in crime and now effectively the highest-ranking nuclear scientist still alive in Iran.

  And where was Dr. Birjandi now? Why wasn’t he answering any of David’s calls? And it wasn’t just Birjandi. Over the past several days, David had called every source, every contact, every person he knew in Iran. What did they know? What were they hearing? Where was the Mahdi? Where were Hosseini and Darazi? What were their plans? What were their strategies? David desperately needed answers, but no one was answering.

  In the fog of war, so much was hazy and confusing. But at least two things were certain: the rocket and missile strikes against Israel were relentless and devastating, and the Israeli air strikes on Iranian targets kept coming, wave after wave.

  Hamas had already fired hundreds of Qassam rockets at Ashkelon, Sderot, and Beersheva, endangering the lives of nearly half a million Israelis living in cities and towns along the southern border with Gaza. They were also firing dozens of longer-range Grad rockets at Ashdod and Tel Aviv.

  At the same time, Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon had already fired thousands of Katyusha rockets at Haifa, Karmiel, Kiryat Shmona, and Tiberias, threatening the nearly one million Israelis living along the northern borders with Lebanon and Syria.

  For reasons beyond David’s comprehension, the Syrians hadn’t fully joined the war yet. They hadn’t fired rockets or missiles except for those first three. They weren’t engaging their air force or even using their antiaircraft systems, despite long-standing defensive treaties between Damascus and Tehran. They still could join the war at any moment, of course, and David, along with every operative and analyst at Langley, fully expected them to do so. What made that prospect particularly worrisome was Syria’s stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. But for the moment, the Syrians were lying dormant. It made no sense, but for now it made the most dangerous strategic threat to the Jewish State the Shahab-class missiles coming out of Iran. True, the Iranians had already fired hundreds of them and weren’t believed to have many left. But every time one of them was fired, the question was, what kind of warhead w
as it carrying—nuclear, chemical, biological, or conventional? It was a crapshoot every time, and it was driving deep fear into the hearts of the Israeli people.

  The Israelis, for their part, kept launching fighter jets and their own missiles against Iranian targets. As far as David knew, Israel had at least succeeded in taking out Iran’s nukes, but this was still all-out war on both sides, and it wasn’t clear to anyone how it was going to end. There didn’t seem to be any part of Iran that was out of the Israelis’ reach, though the city of Karaj, at least, where this safe house was located, had not yet been hit.

  Nevertheless, most other strategic Iranian cities had been, and the near-nonstop bombings and missile strikes were taking an emotional toll on people. Most of the power for Tehran and other major cities had been knocked out. Nearly every Iranian TV and radio station was off the air. The Internet was down. Key government buildings, especially in the capital, were now flaming heaps of wreckage. The Ministry of Defense was a smoldering crater, as was the Ministry of Intelligence, the headquarters for VEVAK. Every real or suspected significant nuclear facility in Iran had been hit multiple times, and while the Israelis had clearly taken great pains to minimize civilian casualties, there had certainly been collateral damage. Thousands upon thousands of Iranians were dead and dying. David didn’t know the number, but he was sure whatever it was, it was climbing by the hour.

  Most of his contacts, David had to assume, either were working feverishly to obey the orders of the Mahdi and Iran’s top generals to strike back at the Israelis or were huddled with their families in basements and bunkers. Those without satellite phones might not be reachable for the duration of the war, however long it took. But even the ones with satphones—the insiders—weren’t answering. Why not? Wasn’t that the point of having the satphones—so that such key men could be reached at all times regardless of the circumstances? Were they really too busy, David wondered, or was it something else? Were they avoiding him? Was he under suspicion after the near-assassination of Javad Nouri? Were they under orders not to speak to him anymore? He was burning to know the answer. He was desperate to find a lead. But for the moment, he was stuck.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Roger Allen stepped out of the West Wing, got into the bulletproof black SUV waiting for him, and ordered they head back immediately to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, roughly a twenty-minute drive at this time of night with no traffic. He was furious, and someone was going to hear about it. No sooner had they pulled out of the White House gates than Allen picked up his phone and speed-dialed his deputy director for operations, who picked up on the first ring.

  “Tom Murray,” said the voice at the other end.

  “Tom, it’s Roger. I’m on the way back.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “How do you think? The president is fit to be tied. He wants to know why he’s not getting hard intel in real time, especially from these satphone intercepts.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “What could I tell him? I told him of course we’d do a better job. But frankly I’m as angry as he is. Why are the translations and analyses going so slow?”

  “It’s the same as we discussed before you left,” Murray replied. “The calls are a treasure trove. But we’re getting more than we expected, faster than we expected, and we’ve got every man on the project we possibly can.”

  “Every man, maybe,” the director said. “But not every woman.”

  There was a pause. “Sir, let’s not go there,” Murray said.

  “We don’t have a choice,” Allen replied.

  “You’re talking about Eva Fischer?” Murray asked.

  “Of course I’m talking about Eva. Frankly it was idiotic for Zalinsky to lock her up in the first place, and it’s time to stop this nonsense, release her, and get her back to work.”

  “Sir, Agent Fischer co-opted a multimillion-dollar intelligence platform. She did it without authorization. And why? To save the life of a friend.”

  “No, Tom, to save the life of an agent,” the director shot back. “For crying out loud, she saved the life of Zephyr, who by your own admission is our most effective agent inside Iran, the guy who single-handedly identified the location of the warheads. Come on now, you’re telling me you don’t think Jack overreacted?”

  “Jack did exactly what I would have done.”

  “Really? Lock up one of our best Farsi speakers and best analysts in the middle of a war with Iran, and for what? For saving our best asset inside the regime?”

  “Sir, she compromised our ability to track one of the very nuclear warheads inside Iran that we now can’t find—one that could be headed toward the United States.”

  “Enough, Tom,” Allen said. “I want Fischer released immediately, with a full exoneration and a $50,000 bonus as compensation.”

  “Sir, I don’t think—”

  “That not a suggestion, Tom. It’s an order. I want Agent Fischer released, apologized to, fully reinstated, compensated, and sitting in my office by the time I get back. You’ve got sixteen minutes. I suggest you get cracking.”

  7

  SYRACUSE, NEW YORK

  What had struck Marseille most about the memorial service was how clearly beloved Mrs. Shirazi had been throughout the Syracuse community. She hadn’t known that David’s mom had, for more than two decades, been a loyal volunteer for the American Red Cross or that she’d been a tireless—and apparently quite effective—fund-raiser for the pediatric heart center at Upstate Medical, the hospital where Dr. Shirazi worked. So many of the friends she had made in both places came to show their respects, as did several families whose lives had been touched or whose children had been saved as a result of this dear woman’s efforts. Most touching to Marseille was watching several of Mrs. Shirazi’s closest friends read tributes, some of them successfully fighting back tears, some less so.

  None of it, Marseille was certain, had provided the closure the family really needed. To make matters worse, Mrs. Shirazi’s burial would have to wait until sometime in April or early May, since the ground at the cemetery was presently covered with too much snow and was far too cold and hard to dig a grave, all of which meant the family’s raw wounds would be subjected to even more pain in another few weeks when they essentially had to do this all over again.

  When the service was over, Dr. Shirazi had invited everyone back to his home. Indeed, he had insisted upon hosting three days of mourning for family and friends. This, it turned out, was an Islamic tradition, which Marseille found curious, since Dr. Shirazi was not a religious man, and neither were his wife or their sons. The Shirazis had long since abandoned Islam, but Marseille sensed that this ritual was far more about tradition than religion. This was about Dr. Shirazi operating on autopilot, doing what he had seen his parents do, and their parents before them, not trying to invent a new family tradition at a time like this. So she had followed everyone else over to the Shirazi house and offered to help serve food and run out for more ice and help in any other way she could. When she wasn’t needed, she just sat in the back of the living room and kept quiet, observing the people coming and going, and praying a lot, sometimes with her eyes open and sometimes with them closed.

  She observed that this was not really dissimilar from the tradition of her Jewish friends in Portland who sat shivah for seven days following the death of a loved one. There was something simple, even sweet, about sitting in a family’s living room, saying little or nothing, but just being near them, with them, around them while they grieved for their loved one and she grieved with them. Marseille found herself wishing it was a tradition her family had practiced after the death of her mother. It would have been good, Marseille thought, for her father to sit with friends for seven days and let himself cry and weep and mourn properly. She had been only fifteen then, but she was pretty sure her father had never mourned properly. He had certainly never been able to heal from the gaping wound in his heart. Losing a spouse was obviously different from losing
a parent. But maybe sitting shivah—or whatever they called it in Islam—was a good thing to do in either case.

  “Loved ones and relatives are to observe a three-day mourning period,” read one website on Islamic death rituals that Marseille had looked up on her iPhone after the service. “Mourning is observed in Islam by increased devotion, receiving visitors and condolences, and avoiding decorative clothing and jewelry.”

  Marseille hadn’t wanted to sit around and “observe” everyone’s mourning, however. That’s why she’d offered to help as much as possible. She’d taken special care to make sure Dr. Shirazi had a fresh cup of Persian tea by his side at all times, with a little drop of honey stirred in, just the way he liked it. She’d helped set out and arrange the food people brought. She’d refilled buckets of ice and made pot after pot of coffee and tea. When she’d noticed that neither of the Shirazi sons were doing it, she had emptied the trash can under the sink in the kitchen, replaced it with a new Hefty bag, and taken the overflowing bag out to the can in the garage. She’d answered phone calls and taken messages when the Shirazi family members were busy. She’d washed dishes as needed and made sure there were enough forks and spoons and napkins available. Perhaps most importantly—or at least most usefully—she had continually refilled the Kleenex canisters strategically positioned all around the first floor.

  All the while, however, she tried to keep a low profile, acting more like the hired help than a friend of the family. She wanted to show her love to the Shirazis, but she didn’t want to presume to be part of the family. Nor did she want others to perceive her as acting like one. She didn’t want any of the real friends of the family asking who she was or why she was there, in large part because she had no idea how to answer such questions. Who was she to these people, really? Why was she there? She couldn’t just come out and say the truth. She wasn’t even entirely sure what the truth was. Was she doing this for the purest of motives, out of genuine, sincere love for the family? Or was she doing it for David, though he probably had no idea she was even there?