The Natanz Directive

by Wayne Simmons

  I felt along the wall and crept forward. I took my Walther in hand and clicked off the safety. The incline emptied into a crawl space six feet long, twenty feet wide and not quite three feet high by my estimation. Light trickled in from a small ventilation grate on the right and two thumb-size holes at the far left of the crawl space. I smelled coffee and sweet spices. Shadows flickered across the grate and I heard the rattle of plates, the splashing of liquid, rapid conversation, and laughter. Definitely an outside café.

  I holstered the pistol, crawled in complete silence toward the grate, and peered out. Strange, seeing the bottoms of shoes, the occasional bare ankle, and trouser cuffs. I heard the scraping of a chair as someone sat down, the click of a glass, laughter. All routine activities for a café doing a fair run of business for a Thursday night. Or was it Wednesday? It didn’t matter. What mattered was the normalcy. You wouldn’t hear laughter if the Revolutionary Guards were parading about.

  I moved away from the grate and crawled toward the holes on the left. I put my eye up to one of them and saw cardboard cartons. More cartons sat on shelves along the wall at the opposite side of a narrow floor. There was a door to the right, which was closed. This had to be the storage room Leila had mentioned.

  I used the light of my iPhone to get a better view. The holes ran along the top of a shoulder-wide board. I stuck my fingers into the holes, gave a gentle tug, and realized the board was loose by design.

  I gave it another tug. If there was anyone in the stockroom, I thought, it would make for an interesting encounter, but I didn’t have the luxury of waiting. Dust sifted from the edges. This time I put a little more weight behind it. The board pulled free, but not without a painfully loud squeak.

  I froze. I counted to five. Nothing.

  I gave a last tug and the board gave way. I pushed aside the cartons concealing the entrance and snaked out of the crawl space. I replaced the board and yanked it firmly into place. I returned the cartons and felt the strain in my knees as I struggled to my feet.

  I was brushing dust from my clothes when the door opened. A man wearing a white apron stepped in. He did a double take. There were about two seconds during which his brain tried to decide whether this guy in the rumpled coat, cross-trainers, and baseball cap really belonged in his storeroom. I used the first of the two seconds to grab a large burlap bag filled with coffee beans. I used the next second to thrust the bag into the man’s hand. This created an extra moment of confusion, enough time to put my hand on his neck and pinch the pressure point at the side of his throat. He gasped; this was normal. His eyes bugged out, which was also normal. He crumpled to the floor, the bag split apart, and beans spilled out all around him. He wouldn’t be out long.

  I walked out the door, closed it behind me as if I’d done so a thousand times, and entered the open-air café. No one noticed. I wove in and among a dozen tables until I was outside on the walk.

  I put my sunglasses on and spent five seconds studying the street. I glanced in the direction of Leila’s market. Two white Toyota HiLux vans marked with the words SPECIAL POLISE on the side were driving away. I saw Leila standing on the curb with her arms crossed. They must’ve searched her place from top to bottom and come up empty. Otherwise they sure as hell would’ve taken her away, and who knows what would have become of her.

  How do you say thank you from a hundred yards away, knowing someone just put her life on the line for you? How do you say thank you to someone you’ll probably never see again, never hear her voice again, never know her fate? I guess you don’t. Which made that last kiss that much more special. I kind of hoped she felt the same.

  I hoisted my backpack and headed in the opposite direction. I walked two blocks east and then a block north, just to get off the beaten track. I ducked into a crowded bistro. I took a corner table with a view of the street and quick access to the kitchen, worst-case scenario.

  I sent a text to Charlie with my location at the corner of Jomhouri Eslami and Felestin.

  He replied, Honcho’s men are on the way. White Nissan van. Two of them. One dressed in black. Will ask if you want a ride to the airport. Say that you can only pay in rials.

  I should have ordered something to eat, but I didn’t. I drank coffee with cream and sipped a bottle of mineral water. Real healthy, Jake. Real healthy. Not to worry; I’d put a steak on the grill the day I got home, and Cathy could whip up one of her world-class tomato salads.

  I paid my bill and crossed the street to a newsstand. I stood off to the side, pretended to browse, and texted General Rutledge a short update. It didn’t say much, only that things were “progressing.”

  I knew that wouldn’t satisfy Tom, but I had learned something about intel over the years. Don’t anticipate. Don’t hope for the best. When you have the intel in hand, say you have it in hand. Otherwise, just keep digging.

  I knew Mr. Elliot would understand this, so I sent him the same message. Maybe he’d give the general a call and tell him to sit tight.

  With any luck, I’d have the launch sites in hand by nightfall, and then the air force could do their thing. I didn’t often feel nervous about an op. Anxiety was a red flag when you were dealing with the scumbags of the world. But so many things hung in the balance on this mission. I’d been dodging bullets—literally, in some cases—since the beginning. I didn’t believe much in luck, but I had a bad feeling that what luck I had I’d used up. And now I was waiting on two guys I’d never met before, two guys who worked for an organization with a traitor in their midst.

  Tehran was lousy with white vans—at least that’s the way it seemed as I thumbed through a magazine dedicated to Iranian soccer—and they paraded north and south on Felestin Street along with a scattering of taxis and buses and cars manufactured in places as far away as Korea and Sweden. After a good forty minutes, one rusted junker with TAXI printed on the sides slowed in front of the bistro and halted. A man wearing a black coat over blue jeans dismounted from the front passenger’s side. Thick mustache. Twentysomething. He had a definite edge to him. He waited as the van sputtered away, then glanced into the bistro.

  This had to be the one Charlie had referred to as the man in black. I went to the next corner and crossed with a half-dozen other people when the light changed.

  I watched as he drew out his cell phone and made a call. Ten seconds later, the van returned from an apparent trip around the block. The man in black had his hand on the passenger-side door when he saw me coming. He didn’t wave, and he didn’t stare. Good. What he did was smile at several other people coming his way, gestured toward the van as if it were the best taxi in Tehran, and apparently offered them transportation, which none of them seemed inclined to accept.

  I was liking how this guy handled himself. When I approached, he went through the same routine. A smile, a nominal gesture in the direction of the van, a polite invitation in surprisingly polished English: “You would like a ride to the airport, sir?”

  We made eye contact. I studied his face for less than a second and drew on thirty years of stress-recognition training. Tension, but not anxiety. Focus, but not trepidation. Good. “That would be nice. But I can only pay in rials.”

  “Rials are fine.” He opened the passenger-side door. “Please. Get in.”

  I climbed aboard. Duct tape crisscrossed the cracked and tattered vinyl seats. Ragged holes dotted the rusted floor panels. A slab of plywood had replaced the window behind my left shoulder. The rearview mirror was a small bathroom vanity mirror wired to the ceiling post. I settled onto the seat, and a spring dug into my ass. Apparently nothing was too good for an American with rials to spend.

  “Nice ride,” I said. “What took you so long?”

  “Our guy’s on the run,” the man in black said from the backseat. “We finally got a fix. He’s headed for a warehouse in the Old City.”

  I nodded. He wasn’t lying. I said, “You guys got names?”

  “I’m Giv. Your driver’s Zand.”

  Zand was probably ab
out thirty, but the graying temples added ten years. And the exaggerated worry lines that creased his forehead and branched out around his eyes added another ten. He held out his hand. It was the hand of a laborer. His grip was aggressive and sure.

  He shifted the van into gear, and we rumbled from the curb.

  Giv pointed to a bundle wrapped in canvas by my feet. I bent down and flipped a corner of the canvas aside. A pair of Russian AK-47s with the tubular stocks folded against the receivers stared back me. The MEK didn’t care where their armament came from. Carrying a Russian rifle had no bearing on their loyalty, any more than carrying a German handgun or a Swiss blade. The MEK was loyal to only one cause, and that was their own.

  “Insurance once we get to our destination,” Giv said.

  I wanted to say that if AK-47s were necessary in the next hour, odds were very high that we were all dead and that the mission had fallen short.

  Giv fell silent. He watched the traffic behind us like a man expecting the worst. He watched the people on the walks as if everyone of them had it in for us. Zand concentrated on the road, a hand on the wheel, a hand on the gearshift. I powered up my phone and texted an update to Rutledge, this one more detailed than the last. I used the most basic tradecraft lingo to tell him where I was going and why and what I would do the minute I had the launch sites for twenty-one Sejil-2 missiles, each capable of delivering a nuclear weapon twelve hundred miles with accuracy.

  I pressed the Send button. I looked up from the phone and glanced across the seat at Zand. “How’d you two rate this assignment?” I asked.

  Zand gave me the benefit of a mild shrug. “Mr. Bagheri has seven daughters and six sons-in-law. We’re two of the six. We’d die for him. Which means we’ll die getting you where you’re going if we have to.”

  He cast a glance my way. I answered with a short nod and bit of sarcasm. “Seven daughters. That must have made life interesting.”

  Giv didn’t get my humor. He said, “He wants them to know what a free Iran feels like.”

  “I don’t blame him.”

  We drove north three more blocks. Then we turned west onto Enghelab Street. A small white Mercedes coupe came south on Felestin Street and accelerated around the corner. The car lunged after us like a dog chasing a rabbit.

  “Zand.” Giv nodded toward the rearview.

  Zand glanced into the mirror and shook his head, pissed, but not panicked.

  Red lights flashed inside the grille of the coupe.

  Giv cursed, “Polise.”

  The Walther was in my hand even before the word left his mouth. My heart rate jumped three beats a minute. Music filled my head. George Thorogood. “Bad to the Bone.” Fighting music.

  CHAPTER 27

  Giv reached out and gripped my shoulder. “City police. Not black beards,” he said.

  That was the Revolutionary Guards’ trademark: their black beards. Well, their black beards, their patented scowls, their battle gear—anything that heightened the fear. I saw the white Mercedes closing in on our rear bumper, lights flashing. The Revolutionary Guards I had seen outside Leila’s place drove the bulkier, more ominous-looking Toyota HiLux.

  “Let’s see what they want. We run or put up a fight, we got no chance of making our rendezvous.”

  “Yeah, and if they haul us in, we have even less chance of making our rendezvous,” I said. I glanced at the AK-47s wrapped in the canvas by my feet. Okay, so if it did come down to a fight, at least we had the firepower to make it interesting.

  “Please put your gun away, Mr. Moreau,” the man at the wheel said. He was already rolling down his window. “They may have recognized our van.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  He glanced at me. His expression only reinforced that I clearly had not had time to grasp the unwritten rules that governed the underground in a city run by fanatics. He said, “The Guards we cannot buy off. We don’t even try. It’s the next best thing to signing your own death warrant. The police, they are a different story. Most loathe the current regime. Most have families.”

  Zand eased the van up to the curb and rolled to a stop.

  Have at least two contingencies, Mr. Elliot used to say. Contingency number one: a viable escape route. I spent three seconds building a visual map of the neighborhood. There were small shops and apartments jammed together on either side of the street. But there was a florist on the immediate right, with the front door propped open with a plastic bucket that held fresh bouquets. Assuming the florist had an exit onto the alley—nobody likes assumptions, but this seemed like a pretty safe one—I could be out in the alley in ten seconds and improvising my next step. Contingency number two: incapacitate the police, relieve them of their weapons, and trade the van for their police car. I liked this one better, though I didn’t know if Giv and Zand were up to it.

  The Mercedes halted behind us. The frantic rhythm of its red emergency lights screamed danger. I watched in the van’s side mirror.

  The driver got out. He adjusted his uniform and hitched up his pistol belt; in other words, he could have been any out-of-shape cop in any city in the world. He walked toward the left side of the van while his partner stayed behind in the sedan. Zand waited, his gaze shifting from the rearview to the outside mirror. He prepared himself with a deep breath.

  By this time, I’d decided on contingency number one if things went bad. If push came to shove, the cop approaching Zand’s window would get the first bullet. I’d roll out the passenger-side door, drill the other one with a couple of shots through the windshield, and sprint into the florist. It wasn’t a great plan.

  I scoped the area, looking for unmarked cars or suspicious figures among the pedestrians. I saw none. So, if it was a trap, it was a well-disguised one. If the Revolutionary Guards were onto me, they would never send just one squad car. They’d send two dozen commandos. That was how they operated.

  The cop sauntered up to the window. He peeked in, his dark, pointed face charged by an elongated nose and a poorly trimmed mustache. Sunglasses covered his eyes, even though the sun had long since hidden itself along the western horizon. He eased an elbow onto the doorframe and smiled the kind of smile that a banker shares with a customer seeking an embarrassingly high-interest loan.

  He and Zand exchanged greetings in relaxed Farsi, and I had to wonder what the hell was going on. He glanced into the back at Giv. He said, “Pleasant day, no, Giv?”

  “Not a bad day, Farid,” Giv replied.

  Very chummy. If this cop was after me, he did a great job of hiding his jitters.

  Farid looked at me now. He lifted his sunglasses. His brow cinched and the edges of his mouth quirked. His gaze traveled to the canvas bundle on the floor and returned to me with an amused grin.

  I smiled. It wasn’t a particularly friendly smile because I was also calculating the geometry necessary to plant a 9 mm slug in his forehead.

  Giv coughed, loudly and deliberately. I saw him turn a palm up at the cop. He said, “What do you want, Farid?”

  The cop turned from me and replaced his sunglasses. “I was getting worried you had forgotten me.”

  “We’ve been busy. What do you need?”

  “What I always need.” The cop rubbed his fingertips together. This wasn’t about me after all. It was about his regular shakedown. Yeah, I was relieved, but a guy on the take was no better than a cockroach on the sidewalk. Both deserved to be squashed. Maybe I’d shoot him just on principle alone. His grin widened. “Could be your boss’ warehouse is overdue for an inspection. What do you think?”

  It was no secret that the MEK smuggled contraband in from Europe and the Far East. They were one of Charlie’s biggest competitors.

  “Can’t have that, can we?” Giv said. He reached into his coat and retrieved his wallet. He counted out all the bills that he had, euros, not rials. He held it out. “I’m short. You’re not gonna make an issue out of it, I hope.”

  Farid gestured for the money. Giv reached across Zand’s chest and gav
e it to him. Counted it. Then grinned. “Nah, this’ll hold you till next week.” He slapped the money against the doorframe and turned back to his car.

  “Baksheesh,” Giv said to me. “Protection money.”

  “Yeah, I got it,” I said. The question was, did I believe it? This op was so full of smoke and misdirection that an elaborate double cross would not have surprised me.

  The three of us were watching as Farid got back inside the Mercedes. The windshield threw shadows across his face, but there was no mistaking the smirk as he showed off the payout to his partner. The emergency lights stopped flashing.

  Zand put the van in gear. We lurched away from the curb and back into traffic. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I probably would have burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of what had just happened. On balance, we’d just lost ten minutes, and I wasn’t sure we had ten minutes to lose.

  I felt my iPhone vibrate. An incoming message from General Tom Rutledge read: Need to talk.

  “Problem?” Zand misread the expression on my face.

  “I need two minutes,” I said to him. “Find a place to stop.”

  Zand swung onto a side street and pulled up next to small, neighborhood park. Before I climbed out, I looked back at Giv. “Check with your boss. Make sure we’re on schedule.”

  Then I glanced at our driver. “Keep the engine running.”

  I connected an earpiece to the phone and put some space between myself and the van. I stopped under a shaggy plain tree, engaged the secure-call app, and called General Rutledge’s number.

  On the second ring, he answered, his voice brusque and strained. “I know you’re on the move, but I wanted you to know what we know.”

  “Go.”

  “You were right,” he said, and then confirmed that everything I’d sent him since day one had been verified, including the fact that satellite recon and sources on the ground had established that all twenty-one Sejil-2 missiles were on the move.