The Natanz Directive

by Wayne Simmons

  I went into full evaluation mode, using rapid-identification techniques that had been ingrained in me over the last three decades and came to the conclusion that the men and women down there were acting as if these were live warheads. As badly as I wanted to believe that I had destroyed the critical electronic components that Morshed had been transporting into the country, the picture wasn’t right.

  All the intel I had collected indicated that the Iranians had twenty-one missiles. I had just accounted for fourteen of them. Okay, fine. Where the hell were the other seven?

  I recorded as much as possible, then decided I should get the hell out while my luck was still holding. In case it didn’t, I activated my iPhone to transmit the videos and photographs to General Rutledge. I don’t know if I actually expected to get a satellite signal this far underground, but it didn’t happen. Odd, but that made me more nervous than anything I had done in the last two hours. I took a deep breath and told myself to get a grip. Getting a grip really meant a steady, deep breath and driving my heart rate from seventy-six back to sixty-two. It took less than fifteen seconds but the pause still pissed me off.

  The skywalk carried me back through four chambers and down to the catwalk in the first room. The catwalk and the tunnel merged again, and I jogged back to the rear entrance and outside. It was 3:36 A.M. The air bit into my skin, and I realized I was sweating.

  If you expect the worst, there’s probably a reason. The first thing I saw was a squad of soldiers hustling along the fence. It didn’t look like your normal, everyday perimeter watch. Maybe because they were jogging, and maybe because I could heard their voices all the way across the compound. It was probably a safe bet they were looking for their two missing guards. Too bad they couldn’t ask me, because I really could have saved them a lot of time.

  I had a decision to make. Did I trust my disguise and my newly acquired ID badge enough to use the old Daihatsu pickup truck I’d arrived in, or was that just asking for trouble? In either case, I needed my backpack, so I hurried across the compound to the door that led to the underground parking lot. I took the stairs two at a time and cut between three or four dozen cars to the parking space I had chosen more than two hours earlier. I was surprised how many cars had come and gone since I had ventured inside. For some reason, that didn’t sit very well with me, and I decided against the truck.

  I sidled up to the Daihatsu, keyed the lock, and reached casually inside. I hoisted my backpack. I went back up top.

  I hadn’t gone more than four or five strides when a man in overalls just like mine emerged from a side door of a detached, single-story office building on the far side of the lot. He had a courier bag slung over his back and was adjusting the neck strap of his helmet. He approached a Honda motorcycle and swung one leg over the seat.

  There it was, my ticket out of Natanz.

  The courier had the engine started and the headlight lit when he saw me coming. I raised my hand and called out to him like a long-lost friend, or at least a colleague in need of a helping hand or a cigarette. He eased back on the throttle and pointed to his helmet as if he hadn’t heard me. He unsnapped the neck strap and lifted the helmet in two hands.

  I smiled, said, “Good evening,” in my best Farsi, and clotheslined him. He fell backward, and the motorcycle clattered to the ground.

  He rolled to his side with surprising speed and drew a pistol from a belt holster. I had made a mistake: this was no ordinary courier, and I should have seen that even before I’d started his way.

  Now I had to kill him. I kicked the gun from his hand and aimed mine at his head. One quick shot between his eyes.

  I holstered the Walther, grabbed the collar of his jacket, and dragged him behind the building. I put on his helmet, goggles, and gloves, and slipped the courier bag over the shoulder opposite my backpack.

  I walked calmly back to the Honda and jumped aboard. I turned the ignition. I’d grown up riding motorcycles. My biggest problem was always an overwhelming urge to see whether a bike’s speedometer was really accurate once you broke one hundred miles per hour. Of course, once you broke that mark, you didn’t really care about the speedometer.

  Not this time. I cruised along the asphalt lane toward the front gate of the complex at a crawl. I beeped the horn and flicked my high beams at the guards. I trusted my instinct that the guards were vigilant about keeping intruders out but not so vigilant keeping them in.

  The security bar over the exit lane pivoted, and I scooted through. I goosed the throttle and headed back down the road toward Natanz. I reached the main highway and stopped long enough to access my iPhone, disarm the Russian suitcase bomb, and activate the device’s self-destruct function. Then I turned north, toward Tehran. If I never saw Natanz again, it would be way too soon. Except maybe on the news, engulfed in the flames of a twenty-two-thousand-pound bunker buster.

  I didn’t stop until I got to Kashan. I parked the motorcycle a block from the safe house. It was still pitch dark outside and like a ghost town, so I used the alley. I jumped the fence into the backyard, followed a stone path through a rose garden waiting for spring to come, and stopped at the back door. I peered in. If Charlie and Jeri were still there, they were sitting in the dark.

  I knocked softly. Knocked again. Jeri was all of a sudden standing behind me.

  “Glad I’m one of the good guys,” she whispered.

  I turned my head. Smiled. “If you weren’t, you’d be dead.”

  “Good to know.” She brushed past me, all business. She turned the knob, and the door opened. “Charlie’s inside. We didn’t know when to expect you.”

  Charlie was in the kitchen. He was putting water on the burner of the stove. “Tea?” he said as if I lived next door.

  “Hot. Very hot,” I said.

  They didn’t say, How’d it go? or, What the hell took you so long?

  We drank tea in silence for what seemed a long time. Finally, I said, “There’s seven missiles missing.”

  “How inconsiderate,” Charlie said. “Armed?”

  “They were arming the other fourteen. I can only assume.” I took out my iPhone. I gave Charlie and Jeri a blow-by-blow of the last twelve hours while I transmitted the videos from inside the plant to General Rutledge and Mr. Elliot. The files were huge. Even with compression technology, the iPhone’s tiny antenna restricted bandwidth, and the process took agonizingly long minutes.

  The transmission app finally beeped that the file transfer was completed.

  Rutledge sent an alert. He needed to chat. No way he could have reviewed the videos already, so it had to be something else. I had a pretty good idea what it was.

  “I saw the file,” he said. “You got in.” He didn’t ask how.

  “Academy Award–winning stuff,” I said. “Party time.”

  “I’m on it as soon as we hang up.” His face compressed into a ball of deep concentration. I’d seen the look before.

  “Problem?”

  “Yeah. Several.”

  “This have anything to do with Big Tuna?” I asked. We fell into basic tradecraft. Tag names only. Big Tuna: Atash Morshed. “I hope you don’t want a word with him. He’s under a bed in a hotel room. And the room probably doesn’t smell particularly good right about now.”

  “It’s about the aces,” Tom said. He meant the circuits boards.

  “Yeah, I know. The one’s I took from him weren’t the only ones, were they?” It may have sounded like a guess, but it wasn’t. Not after what I’d seen in Natanz. “Spit it out. I’m a big boy.”

  “Big Tuna was a decoy. Six hours ago, we learned there were actually forty-eight aces. While we were busy tracking Big Tuna, another player hit the ground with twenty-four more.”

  “Makes sense. It was way too easy.” I told him about the seven unaccounted-for Sejil-2 missiles.

  “Okay, priority one is their TO,” he said, meaning the missiles’ targeting orders. Tom looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, and his next statement sounded a bit like a man r
unning on empty. “If there are any.”

  “I think it would be pretty dumb to assume otherwise, don’t you think?”

  “Roger that.”

  “I’m on it.”

  “I know you are,” he said. “Keep the ball rolling, my friend.”

  “Fast and furious.” We hung up.

  I made a second call. Mr. Elliot must have had his finger on the Call button, because I heard his voice after a single ring. “You’ve been on with Orion,” he said. Orion: General Rutledge.

  “You’ve been eavesdropping.”

  “Which reminds me. Send a note to our friend in Virginia, will you? Catch him up before he has a heart attack,” Mr. Elliot said. “And it’ll give me a chance to see who he’s talking to.”

  “Will do,” I said. “Remember Panama City?”

  I heard a short, discerning pause. Not a question, just a rapid shifting of gears that took him back nearly three decades. He said, “Oh, you mean when everyone and their brother showed up at our party uninvited.” When he said everyone, he meant the ATF, the DEA, and a couple of guys from the FBI. “Jumped into our op with bullhorns blaring and bells clanging. What about it?”

  “J.K.” These were the initials of one of the Iranian drug cartel’s bagmen at the aforementioned “party.” His name was Jilil Kasra.

  “Good-looking kid. Bright. Yeah, I remember.”

  “I need a photograph.”

  Mr. Elliot didn’t ask why. If I made the request, it was important. He didn’t ask by when. If I made the request, it meant as soon as possible. “Already done.”

  He hung up. I looked at Charlie and said to him, “Tell me about your eyes and ears in National Security.” I was talking about the woman Charlie had recruited years ago to keep him informed about the comings and goings of Iran’s infamous security service.

  He nodded. “Jannata. What about her?”

  “We need her to find an old friend of mine named Jilil Kasra.”

  CHAPTER 22

  KASHAN—DAY 9

  Mr. Elliot delivered Jilil Kasra’s photograph in less than twenty minutes. It was a twenty-seven-year-old mug shot that the Panama City, Florida police had, by pure luck, transferred to microfiche twenty-some years back instead of destroying it.

  That’s where I’d met Jilil Kasra, in a Panama City jail cell after the boys from Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives blew up an op I was running out of South Bimini.

  The ATF didn’t get the guys my op had been targeting; in fact, all they really managed to do was scare off the guys my op was targeting. Not their fault. Instead, they’d ended up with Jilil Kasra, two other twenty-something Iranian bagmen, and me.

  They threw us into a holding cell. I had a couple of days to kill before Mr. Elliot did his thing and got me released, so I spent the time getting to know Jilil. No, I wasn’t being nice. I was working. I saw a potential asset. In exchange for Jilil’s cooperation, Mr. Elliot got two years trimmed off his four-year sentence.

  I’d stayed in touch with Jilil even after he returned to Iran. I had kept track of him until the shah was deposed, and then he’d disappeared. Maybe he was dead. I didn’t think so.

  We transferred the photo onto Charlie’s computer. He and Jeri stared at it. “We need to find this guy,” I said. “He was government back in the shah’s day. But he changed his name when the ayatollah took charge.”

  “Better than dangling from the end of a crane in the middle of Revolution Square,” Jeri offered.

  “I won’t argue that.”

  “And you want me to show this guy’s picture to Jannata hoping for what exactly? Like maybe she ran into him in some government cafeteria eating hummus and grape leaves?” Charlie said. The guy had a sense of humor, but I was too exhausted to laugh.

  “I want her to run it through the government’s labor-pool records. You and I both know that National Security watches their own people as close as they watch anyone else.”

  “Closer,” Jeri said. “And a photo search wouldn’t be that uncommon.”

  Charlie shook his head. “She’ll need a reason. And a good one.”

  “Charlie. If you ask Jannata, she’ll come up with a reason. That’s why you pay her,” I said. “And if you need to tell her how important it is, tell her.” And then I thought to add, “Because it is.”

  We had to wait until morning before Charlie could make contact with Jannata, so we traveled back to Seyfabad via helicopter. The trip took an hour and thirty-five minutes, and Jeri kept the chopper so low to the ground that the barren hills off our port side looked like angry waves on a dirty brown sea. The girl knew how to fly.

  Charlie made his call to Jannata as we drove from Seyfabad toward the city. They had a system. Jannata always carried a prepaid phone. Charlie’s people smuggled thousands of them a year into the country, and the black market sold them like hotcakes.

  “One of my really hot numbers,” Charlie said about the phones. “I like my people to carry them, too. We change Jannata’s out every ten days, just to be safe.”

  Charlie caught Jannata on her way into the office. It was a one-sided conversation, but I didn’t get the impression that she was all that excited by his request. I heard him say, “I’m sending the photo over right now. Check your phone. Download it, and then toss it. Call me as soon as you get a hit. And, Jannata. Top priority.”

  Jannata called Charlie back from a bus stop across the street from the Ministry of Interior forty-three minutes later. By then, Charlie and I had twelve men in position just waiting for orders.

  Jannata had chosen the location intentionally because that was exactly where Jilil Kasra acted as the department’s deputy minister, a very powerful position. He was on the eighth floor, corner office, facing our way.

  “His name is Pasha Fardin,” Charlie said. “Any reference to your guy Jilil Kasra was lost during the revolution. Very convenient.”

  “He’s done well for himself,” I said.

  “I wish he hadn’t done quite so well,” Jeri chimed in rather sarcastically. “A deputy minister? Sure be a lot easier to get to him if he was the janitor.”

  “But a janitor wouldn’t have any information about an impending attack on Israel,” I said without an ounce of emotion in my voice. “And that’s exactly what he’s going to tell me.”

  Charlie twisted his head around and stared at me from the front seat. I caught Jeri’s reflection in the rearview mirror, and her eyes were cold and calculating. She said, “Your powers of persuasion must be off the charts, Jake. And I want to be there when you ask him.”

  Charlie was holding his cell phone against his chest. “So, what do I tell Jannata? I assume you have a plan.”

  “She needs to get Jilil a message without waking up the entire security apparatus. So it can’t be sent electronically or over the phone.”

  Charlie shrugged. I loved it when he shrugged, because it meant the answer was as plain as the nose on my face. “She could hand deliver it. If someone’s making inquiries about someone in the Ministry of Interior, she’d probably want to investigate it in person, wouldn’t she?”

  Jeri looked at me in the mirror. Her expression said, And all this time I thought you were the expert.

  “Too easy,” I said. But Mr. Elliot had a theory that he made sure I never forgot: the more complicated you make things, the more things can go wrong.

  Charlie showed me his palms. “Jannata’s waiting.”

  “Okay. This is how she does it. She walks in with her briefcase, laptop, files, whatever looks most official, most natural. She flips the light switch two times so we know she’s in. Then she hands Jilil a business card and a disposable phone. On the back of the card, she writes, ‘Remember Panama City? You still owe me a cup of coffee.’ Then she hands him the phone, and I call it.”

  Charlie repeated the instructions into the phone. Before he hung up, I added, “Make sure she doesn’t leave the card or the phone.”

  “She’s on the way.” Charlie hung up. He handed m
e a disposable phone with Jannata’s number already on the screen.

  Less than a minute later, the lights in Jilil’s eighth-floor office flicked on and off twice. I counted thirty seconds in my head and dialed the number. Jilil Kasra answered. He said, “Yes?”

  “Hello, my friend. It’s been a long time. Time we caught up. Ten minutes from now at Café Rumi. You know where it is, I’m sure. Does that work for you?” Always polite, always mannerly. Basic tradecraft.

  After a nearly interminable silence, Jilil Kasra answered, “Yes. That’s fine.”

  “Good. Very good. And please talk to no one else in the meantime, my friend.” I let the words sink in. “And now if you’ll hand the phone back to my associate.”

  The phone went dead in my ear. “Okay. Good.” I looked at Charlie. “Send a text to our surveillance guys. Game on. And Charlie, we don’t let this guy out of our sight for even a second.”

  Café Rumi occupied a corner lot on Mir Avenue across from Laleh Park, and Jeri and I walked the last block while Charlie coordinated surveillance. You couldn’t get away from people, which was exactly why I’d chosen it. The confluence of foot traffic from government buildings in either direction, shops and restaurants and apartment houses to the west, and the park to the east made it a free-for-all of tourists and town folk. Perfect. And no one would think a thing of a government employee like Jilil Kasra, aka Pasha Fardin, spending his break there.

  My phone vibrated when we were three doors away from the café, signaling an incoming text message from Charlie: All clear.

  The café was packed when Jeri and I walked in, but a table in the corner came open when a young couple—part of our team—pulled up stakes and walked out arm in arm. Jeri and I made our way to the table. I watched the door while she ordered coffee.

  I was trying to imagine a fifty-year-old Jilil Kasra when a man in a very nicely tailored suit walked in with a newspaper tucked under his arm. He’d lost his hair and his mustache was gray, but there was still an air of aristocracy about him. Also an air of sadness. I tried to gauge the depth of his anxiety after reading Jannata’s note and talking to me on the phone, but he seemed more raptorial than hunted. I took that as a good sign.