Abbasi wasn’t going home to stay, of course. If any of his superiors or the guards at the gate asked him, he would tell them he was simply going back to get a pillow, a blanket, and his toiletries. He, too, would be making his new office his home for the next few months. But on this particular night he had a phone call to make, and it was urgent.
Pulling up to his newly rented efficiency flat on the north side of the city, closer to the mountains, Abbasi shut down the engine of his aging Volkswagen Passat, got out, locked the doors, entered the lobby, and took the elevator to the ninth floor. Upon entering his flat, he locked the door behind him and headed straight for the walk-through closet that connected the main room with a tiny bathroom. Glancing at his watch, he quickly pushed aside several boxes and lifted up a loose floorboard. There he found the satellite phone his Saudi handler had provided him. He powered it up and dialed from memory the number he’d been given.
The voice he recognized came on the line after the third ring.
“Code in,” said the Saudi in flawless Farsi.
Abbasi entered a fourteen-digit code, also from memory, then recited his authentication phrase.
“I was not expecting your call tonight, Kabutar,” the handler said, using Abbasi’s code name, which in Farsi meant “pigeon.” “Is everything all right?”
“No,” Abbasi said. “We have a very serious development, and events are suddenly moving far faster than I had indicated in my last communiqué.”
60
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA—2 OCTOBER
Abdullah bin Rashid’s plane finally landed at an air force base outside the capital.
With lights flashing and siren blaring, his driver raced the armored Bentley the thirty-five kilometers to the royal palace in near-record time. The director of the Saudi Arabia General Intelligence Directorate had been summoned back from Seoul for an emergency meeting slated to begin at precisely noon.
When they pulled up to a covered entrance in the rear of the palace, it was 11:57 a.m. The security detail rushed Rashid inside to what he assumed would be a meeting with a wide range of generals and military advisors. Instead, to his surprise, he met alone with Crown Prince Abdulaziz bin Faisal.
“Good day, Your Royal Highness,” he said with a bow.
The thirty-six-year-old son of the king nodded and bade him come and take a seat next to him. Rashid was still in the suit he’d worn on his private jet. The direct heir to the throne was wearing his trademark white robe, though his kaffiyeh was removed, revealing his prematurely balding head.
“You bring me news,” the crown prince said with an air of assurance.
“I do indeed.”
“His Majesty is in bed. He cannot seem to shake this bout with pneumonia. But he told me I may wake him if the situation warrants.”
“Let him sleep,” said Rashid. “The news I bring you is grave, but no decision he could make today will change that.”
“Very well; proceed.”
“Your Highness, we have two sources who have just contacted us to say that before his death, Russian president Luganov secretly gave a number of Russian nuclear warheads to the North Koreans to be attached to long-range ICBMs that could be launched only at Moscow’s directive.”
“That’s . . . terrifying.”
“Unfortunately, it gets worse.”
“How so?”
“With Luganov’s death, my sources indicate the Persians have persuaded the Dear Leader to sell them five of the Russian warheads. Alireza al-Zanjani is heading to Pyongyang as we speak to oversee the transfer of these weapons to Iran.”
“How trustworthy are these sources of yours?”
“Very.”
“Based in Pyongyang?”
“I wish—we are still working on that. But we do have two in Iran.”
“Persian nationals or foreigners?”
“Persian nationals, Your Highness.”
“Working in the government?”
“Your Majesty, please, I hesitate to say more.”
“Why have I never been told about this before?”
“When your father appointed me to this position, he told me not to brief him on sources and methods,” Rashid said. “Since your father appointed you his heir as well as defense minister, you have not directed me otherwise. Thus I’ve continued under the instructions His Majesty gave me.”
“And yet you are telling me now.”
“Not names or titles.”
“But you’re telling me we have two sources in Tehran that have access to highly classified information.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How did you find them?”
Again, Rashid hesitated. But the crown prince insisted he be told more.
“One of them—the more junior—reached out to us,” Rashid conceded. “The other, well . . . Remember when your father asked us several years ago why the Israelis assassinate every Iranian nuclear expert they find rather than trying to buy them off?”
“Yes.”
“To be blunt, we bought one off.”
“Do these two sources know each other?” the crown prince asked.
“No, sir, they do not.”
“They serve in different parts of the government?”
“All I can say is I am absolutely confident they do not know each other and do not communicate with each other. Thus, the fact they have both transmitted urgent warnings to us in the last twelve hours tells me this is real and very, very dangerous.”
“Have you told the Americans?”
“No, sir.”
“The Emiratis? KBI?”
“No.”
“What about the Israelis?”
“I’ve told no one but you, Your Highness,” Rashid said. “Only two other people on my staff know it—the agents’ handler and my chief of staff. When they learned of it, they called me on a secure line in Seoul and told me to make up an excuse and get home immediately. They didn’t say why, but they didn’t have to. They used a code word during our call that alerted me immediately that we had heard from not just one but both of our sources. That’s why I asked for the emergency meeting with the king and you and the national security team.”
The crown prince exhaled, stood, and paced about his spacious private office. “You know what this means, don’t you?” he asked. “If those warheads reach Iranian soil, we will have no choice but to go to war. The Emiratis will join us. The Israelis, too.” He paused and looked out the bulletproof window at the fountain in the palace courtyard, awash in multicolored spotlights. “But that’s not all,” he continued. “We will have to have atomic weapons of our own. Indeed, I fear we may have reached that point either way. His Majesty has asked me to fly to Islamabad next week. He has authorized me to begin negotiations immediately, and it goes without saying that price will be no object.”
“The Pakistanis certainly have all that we would need,” Rashid noted.
“The Persians were fools to think the Pakistanis would ever sell the Bomb to them. Absolute fools.” Prince Abdulaziz turned and walked directly to Rashid and lowered his voice. “You will come with me, of course,” he said. “But first you must stop this madness. I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care whom you use. But on behalf of the throne, I’m ordering you to make absolutely certain those warheads never make it to Iran.”
61
SOMEWHERE OVER THE PACIFIC OCEAN—6 OCTOBER
Much of the past week had been a blur.
Marcus knew he’d been to Washington, but he had no memory of what he had done there. Now he was in another Gulfstream business jet, about two hundred miles off the coast of Midway, sitting in a window seat next to Nick Vinetti and trying to make sense of what had just happened to him.
“Marcus, I love you like a brother; you know that,” Vinetti said. “But let’s face it; sometimes you can be a real . . .”
Marcus said nothing, just waited for the punchline.
“Look,” Vinetti continued, “I didn’t
have a choice. We slipped a heavy narcotic into your coffee on the way to Washington, and you went out like a light. We kept you drugged the entire time you were at Walter Reed. And don’t look so shocked. There was no way I was going to take a chance on you demanding to talk to the ambassador. I certainly wasn’t going to let you demand to meet with President Clarke and give him a piece of your mind. And you can’t honestly think I was going to answer your incessant questions on where we were keeping your friend the Raven or how hard we were interrogating him. There wasn’t time. The stakes were too high. So, yes, I ordered my team to incapacitate you. And that’s that. End of story. Let’s move on.”
“You drugged me and kept me out of it for a week, just to make things look good for Ambassador Molotov Cocktail, or whatever his name is? On what authority?”
“Whose do you think?”
“No, really. On what authority exactly did you hijack my life?”
“Yours,” Vinetti said. “You remember back in the hotel outside of St. Petersburg, when you signed all those government papers?”
Marcus nodded.
“Didn’t you read them?”
“Forty-odd pages of fine print? How could I?” Marcus said.
“Then why did you sign them?”
“I needed a disguise and a new passport to get out of Russia, and that was the only way you’d give them to me.”
“Well, if you had bothered to read them, you’d have seen that you were giving the Agency unlimited authority to take any measures deemed necessary to protect national interests, with or without your future consent.”
“Nick, you’ve been in the CIA for fifteen minutes longer than me. So where do you get off acting like some Double-O agent with a license to drug?”
“It wasn’t my call, if that makes you feel any better. The order came straight from Director Stephens.”
“But you carried it out.”
“Yes. And it was for your own good. So can we drop it? We’ve got work to do.”
Vinetti tried to shift the conversation to the work ahead of them. He started to explain the plan that U.S. Special Ops commanders were cooking up for them in Japan, but Marcus cut him off.
“We’ll get to that soon enough,” he said. “Tell me what happened in Washington.”
Vinetti was about to protest but seemed to think better of it. He must have known his fellow Marine wasn’t going to let it go until he had answers.
“Fine,” he began. “We had an ambulance pick you up at Andrews when we landed early on Wednesday morning and take you directly to Walter Reed. We’d already worked with the senior staff at the hospital to create a trail of paperwork and electronic medical files documenting that you’d been there for days. The paper trail indicated that you had come back from Berlin with Senator Dayton’s delegation but collapsed from some mysterious illness.”
“And you kept me unconscious the whole time?”
“The whole time.”
“Where?”
“The Infectious Diseases Unit.”
“Oh, great, so I might really come down with Ebola or something after all.”
“Relax—we had you in an isolation ward. There was no danger,” Vinetti said. “And it kept you from being seen by other patients. Of course, it took a fair bit of makeup to cover up all the bruises and cuts on your face, and your broken nose—a real beauty, by the way. How did that happen?”
“Another time,” Marcus said. “Keep going.”
“That’s about it. The secretary of state brought the Russian ambassador by the hospital later that day. We brought him to the isolation ward. He looked at you through the glass. We showed him all your paperwork. We let him talk to your presiding physician and the head of the unit. He chatted with some of the nurses for a bit. Then we sent him on his way.”
“The doctors and nurses were all CIA personnel, I assume?”
“Every single one,” Vinetti confirmed.
“And it worked?”
“Apparently. Petrovsky called Clarke a few hours later to apologize. I can’t say Moscow really believes us. But they’d bet big on us not being able to produce you, and the ambassador seemed pretty stunned to see you lying there. So there you go. Mission accomplished.”
“What about my mom? Did anyone call her?”
“Of course, and your sisters, too. In fact, the day after the ambassador dropped by, we flew your whole family to D.C. to see you. All expenses paid. Put them up at the Willard overnight, brought them to Reed the next morning. Then put them on a plane home. Oh, and Senator Dayton and Annie Stewart took them to dinner—them and that pastor friend of yours and his wife.”
“The Emersons?”
“That’s them. The senator told them all about your time together in Moscow and the Baltics, really talked you up as an asset to the team. It went quite well. I’m told they were all very grateful.”
“And you say Annie was there?”
“Yeah.” Vinetti smiled. “Why?”
“No reason.” Marcus changed the subject. “So how’s Jenny?”
“She’s fine.”
“Did she need surgery?”
“She did, and it went very well.”
“Have you talked with her?”
“No, but I’m told she’s back at her apartment in Moscow, recovering nicely.”
“And the Russians haven’t shown any suspicion?”
“Come on, Marcus, it’s Moscow. The Russians are suspicious of everything. But officially Jenny is the economic attaché. She’s got an MBA from Wharton, so that’s a pretty convincing cover, and she plays her part well. Her deputy has covered for all her meetings and is telling everyone she’s got a nasty case of the flu. The medical attaché performed the surgery himself with his own team inside the embassy. It was all very discreet. Now she’s back at her own place, like I said. Everyone is sending her flowers and cards. So far the story seems to be holding up.”
“I’m glad,” Marcus said. “When you get a moment, please pass along my greetings to Jenny.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Why not?”
“Marcus, forget it. We need to build a firewall between you and this woman. Get this in your head and don’t forget it: You’ve never met Jenny Morris. You’ve never even heard of Jenny Morris. You’ve certainly not spent any time last week with Jenny Morris. And if you want to maintain your cover story, you’re never going to be in touch with her again.”
It was dark when Yong-Jin Yoon arrived home to his flat.
The elevator was still broken. It had been for months, and there was no hope of it being repaired in his lifetime. So the general climbed the stairs to the fourteenth floor as he always did, pulled out his keys, and quietly unlocked the front door, then entered and closed and locked the door behind him immediately. He didn’t want to turn on the lights. He knew his wife had been waiting for him. She always did. Sure enough, there in the moonlight, he found her asleep on the couch, seven months pregnant and as beautiful as when they had first met. She’d set a bowl of rice and steamed vegetables out on the counter beside the sink. It was cold, of course, but he was famished. Still, there were more important things to attend to just now.
“Yuna,” he whispered. “Yuna Kim, I’m home.”
Her eyes opened immediately, and the fear he saw in them was palpable. She was terrified of what lay ahead. It had not been her idea. She was a simple girl from a farming cooperative on the other side of the country, south of Tanch’oˇn.
“What time is it?” she whispered back.
“Did you pack?” the general asked, ignoring her question.
“I did everything just as you asked.” With his help, she pulled herself to her feet.
“Good girl,” he said. “It’s time, and you must hurry.”
“Tell me again—why can’t you take me?”
“You know why,” he replied. “It’s too dangerous. But I should be there by this time tomorrow.”
“But I need you, Yong-Jin. I cannot do
this without—”
The general put his finger over her lips, then kissed her softly. “You’re strong, Yuna Kim, and you’ll do fine. Now, gather your things and go. I will join you as soon as I can.”
A tear rolled down her cheek, but she nodded.
“Oh yes—there is just one more thing you must do for me,” he said, holding her in his arms. “I have sewn something into the lining of your coat. I cannot bring it with me, but it is very important. Keep your coat with you at all times. It cannot leave your sight, for I will need it when I reach you.”
Again she nodded. “What is it, Yong-Jin?”
“Our ticket out.”
62
U.S. FLEET ACTIVITIES NAVAL BASE, YOKOSUKA, JAPAN—7 OCTOBER
“Gentlemen, we’re facing a serious time crunch.”
Captain Curt Berenger, commander of SEAL Team Six, began the briefing precisely at 9 a.m. It had been less than thirty minutes since Ryker, Vinetti, and Oleg Kraskin had landed and linked up with Pete Hwang. They’d had no time to unpack, eat, or catch their breath. Nor would they.
“I want to welcome you to the U.S. Navy’s jewel in Asia,” Berenger continued. “This is our main base and center of operations in this theater, and you’ll have to take it from me—it is a sight to behold. Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to give you boys a proper tour of our fine facilities or Tokyo Bay, much less Japan’s most populated city and national capital, breathtaking all. Instead, in a few minutes, you all and I and two of my platoons are going to board a group of choppers and head to Sado Island. That’s on the other side of this main island, just offshore from the city of Niigata. There, we’re going to link up with the USS Michigan and get under way.”
The Persian Gamble Page 23