by Ben Coes
“They might set off some sort of notification.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Paria. “He’s inside Evin. They can’t do anything and they’ll find out soon enough, if they don’t already know. Run them. One of them might link to some sort of secret files.”
“Yes, sir.”
Paria held the small black Porsche key in his hand.
“They pay well in Israel, yes, General?” remarked the man.
But Paria didn’t answer. Instead, he held the key and rubbed his finger across the logo, admiring it. Finally, he stuck it in his pants pocket.
As they drove down Resalat Highway, Paria opened a manila folder that was tucked into the back of the passenger seat. Inside, a sheath of papers contained Paria’s daily briefing, including his schedule, press reports deemed by his chief of communications to be relevant, mostly articles about the war in Iraq, and operations briefings, which meant any activities of material nature from field operatives.
He pulled one particular piece of paper from the folder and read it twice. Attached to the sheet of paper was a five-by-seven color photograph showing a distinguished-looking man in a bisht, his beard and mustache trimmed neatly, a pair of round glasses on his head. The man’s name was Mohammed Habib. He was a professor of mathematics at Tehran University.
Paria pressed a button on his cell phone.
“Ariz,” said Paria to one of his deputies.
“Yes, General.”
“Professor Habib,” said Paria.
“You have the sheet.”
“And you traced the transfers?”
“Yes, General Paria. The moneys were wired to an account in the professor’s daughter’s name in Lebanon. There can be no doubt.”
“There can always be doubt,” said Paria.
He hung up the phone.
* * *
A few miles east of the presidential palace, the Range Rover came to a stop in front of a beautiful red building, six stories tall, with a tan terra-cotta roof. Carved into the lintel above the doors: TEHRAN UNIVERSITY.
With one of his armed lieutenants positioned a few feet behind him, Paria walked down the fourth-floor corridor in the mathematics department of Tehran University.
They walked past legions of students, milling about in the hallway. Most were male; they stared at Paria as he strode by them. Students walking toward Paria, upon seeing the big, uniformed man, stepped out of the way immediately.
It was not that Paria was widely known; he wasn’t. But a six-foot-tall, two-hundred-and-forty-pound man in a military uniform isn’t something you messed with in Tehran. The fact that Paria’s uniform had no markings, same with the officer trailing a few steps behind, made it clear to all that he was from VEVAK. Everyone had relatives and friends who had mysteriously disappeared over the years, and at no place was that more true than at Tehran University.
Paria came to a doorway halfway down the corridor. He opened the door. Inside, a short man in a button-down shirt, khakis, and glasses, was speaking to a classroom filled with students. The professor looked up as Paria opened the door.
“May I help you?” asked the professor nervously.
“I must speak with you, Professor Habib,” said Paria. He stepped toward Habib. “Now.”
“I’m in the middle of a class. Who are you?”
Paria was silent. He stared at Habib, whose eyes darted back and forth between his students and him.
Paria looked away from Habib to the classroom.
“Clear out,” he said to the class. “Class dismissed.”
“Wait one minute,” said Habib, holding up his hand and trying to stop his students from leaving.
Paria walked to the front of the classroom, as nervous students filed quickly toward the door.
“My name is Abu Paria,” said Paria quietly, so that only Habib could hear.
At the words, the professor visibly jerked backward.
“General Paria,” he said, his voice trembling. “I had no idea.”
Paria came closer to Habib. He turned behind him; the last of the students was hustling out of the room. Paria made eye contact with his aide, nodding at him. The aide shut the door.
Paria moved next to Habib. The professor stood no taller than Paria’s neck, and was skinny and frail. Paria stood over him, staring into his eyes. Without provocation, he swung his right hand through the air, striking Habib with the back of his hand. Habib let out a high scream, then reached for his mouth, which was quickly flowing blood.
“What did I do?” he asked, holding his hand to his mouth.
“Cut the crap,” said Paria. He swung again, this time hitting the other side of the professor’s face with the open palm of his right hand. It caught Habib hard on the ear, and he fell to the ground. “We both know you’ve been selling secrets to Israel.”
“No!” yelled Habib from the linoleum floor, his chin now covered in blood. “The Jews? Never!”
“Cut the crap, I said!”
Paria unleashed a boot to Habib’s groin, which made him crumple to the floor, then lose his wind. He tried to crawl away from Paria, but his groans were hoarse and he couldn’t draw a breath.
“We know you’re an informant, Professor. We traced the funds to your daughter’s account. Do you think we’re idiots? Could you really have thought of nothing more creative?”
A look of pure fear washed across the professor’s face.
“Answer my questions and I’ll let your daughter live.”
Habib struggled to breathe, looking up at Paria with a look of pathetic fear and utter surrender in his eyes. He cowered against the wall as Paria kicked him again, this time in the kneecap, connecting with it with all his fury, the steel of the boot toe ripping through Habib’s pants, into the knee, shattering the kneecap, and making Habib scream as he reached for the knee. Paria descended on him, covering his mouth with his hand.
“Do you believe I’m capable of killing your daughter?” Paria asked, staring menacingly into the professor’s eyes.
Habib moved his head up and down.
“Then answer me.”
“Yes, okay,” said Habib.
“Did you work for Mossad?”
“Yes,” said Habib.
“We knew this. We’ve been watching you for six months now.”
“I’m a mere functionary,” said Habib.
“You betrayed Iran,” said Paria.
“I would say it’s you and your bosses who’ve betrayed Iran,” whispered Habib weakly.
Paria shook his head. He reached down and picked Habib up by the back of his shirt. When he tried to stand, Habib almost fell over due to his shattered knee.
“Stand up,” barked Paria.
“What do you want?” he said, struggling, holding his hand against the desk.
“What do they know of our nuclear program?” whispered Paria.
“How should I know this? I’m not privy to that. I simply relay insights and on-the-ground observations, once a month, that is all, General.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Paria. “What does Shalit know?”
Habib struggled to speak as blood pooled on the ground beneath his bleeding mouth.
“Nothing, General. What is there to know?”
Paria stared down at Habib.
“There’s a lot to know, Professor,” said Paria, looking around at the empty classroom. “More than your big university brain can even begin to contemplate.”
Paria continued to hold the professor tightly, clutching his shirt. It was like holding a rag doll. Paria’s eyes drifted to the open window at the side of the room. He carried Habib toward the window by the shirt collar.
“No,” said Habib, begging. “No, please. I know something.”
“It’s too late for that,” said Paria. “An untrustworthy man will always be untrustworthy. A liar is always a liar.”
Paria brought Habib to the window ledge. He leaned out and looked down at the internal courtyard, which was empty; a pair of gre
en Dumpsters sat in the middle of the courtyard.
“It’s Qassou,” said Habib, blood coursing down his chin.
“Who?” asked Paria, nostrils flaring. “Minister Qassou?”
“Yes.”
“What about him?”
“He’s not as he appears,” whispered Habib.
Paria pushed the frail man’s head out over the window ledge, grasping him by the neck of his button-down shirt. Habib was now extended out over the ledge of the window; the only thing preventing him from falling was Paria, holding him by his shirt.
“What do you mean?” barked Paria. He shook Habib violently in the air. “Speak!”
“He’s working against the Republic,” Habib cried out frantically, tears streaming now down his cheeks as he stared down the empty courtyard below. “He—”
The top button of Habib’s shirt suddenly popped off, then, in a matter of seconds, the rest of the buttons began popping away. Habib suddenly fell, screaming at the top of his lungs. Paria reached for him, but he was too late. He clutched at the professor’s shirttail as the thin brown shirt tore away.
The squirming figure dropped quickly down the four flights, arms and legs flailing, screaming a high, horrific noise that made even the coldhearted Paria wince. His desperate screams echoed up. He landed head first in one of the empty Dumpsters.
“Fuck,” said Paria.
Paria observed the Dumpster for more than a minute, scanning the interior windows of the courtyard for eyes. In his hand, he clutched the tattered shirt. He let it drop. He watched as it floated into the Dumpster, next to Habib’s badly contorted corpse.
“I want all of the professor’s files, computers, everything, on my desk within the hour,” said Paria to the agent at the door as he walked quickly away from the room. “And put a tracking protocol on Minister Qassou. Immediately.”
“Should I have him brought in?”
“No, not yet. But I want to know everything he does. And if he leaves the country, I want a full black team on him. We’re going to find out what he’s up to.”
13
RESTRICTED AREA
NEAR DARBAND CAVE
MAHDISHAHR, IRAN
The mountain was anonymous-looking, just one of a series of smaller mountains at the western edge of the Alborz range. It was covered mostly in rock and dirt, with a few small trees and shrubs dotting its base and low country. This particular highland was a mile and a half inside a restricted nature preserve. Few knew the area’s real purpose. A dirt road led to the base of the small mountain. A camouflaged door, large enough to allow semitractor-trailers, cranes, and other industrial equipment inside, was artfully set into the base of the mountain. In a hidden bunker next to the entrance, half a dozen armed soldiers stood guard, peering out through slats in the mortar.
Behind the disguised entrance was a cavernous, windowless, concrete and steel chamber more than fifty meters high and a hundred long. This tunnel was the only way in or out. At the end of the tunnel was a massive steel-frame sarcophagus built into the base of the mountain. Five stories high, a quarter mile in diameter, the Mahdishahr Nuclear Facility was not as big as Natanz or Qum, but it was big enough. And, it had one quality that made it, in one sense, the most important facility in Iran’s extensive and growing galaxy of covert nuclear activity: Mahdishahr was unknown to Western intelligence services.
Deep inside the sarcophagus, a seventy-four-year-old man in leg braces and a light blue lab coat grasped a wooden cane and hovered alongside the object.
Dr. Kashilla ran his left hand, his only hand, along the welded seam of the object. The seam was perfect except for a small, marble-sized bump near one end. The object was dark silver-steel, shaped like a massive soda can turned on its side, tapered near the back. The object was a few inches under nine feet long. As he stared at the device for the umpteenth time, Kashilla didn’t see the outside of the bomb; it had become invisible to him. Rather, he visualized the interior parts he and his team of scientists and engineers had worked so hard to design and build; the interior of the nuclear bomb he’d given the last decade of his life, his first wife, and his right arm to building.
Dr. Kashilla ran his hand over the fancy Persian script on the underside of the device. Goodbye, Tel Aviv. It had been his original idea to write “Goodbye Israel.” Nava ordered the alteration, the edit, the specificity. As he ran his hand along the paint, that specificity sent a chill up Kashilla’s spine.
The nuclear device, Iran’s first, weighed exactly 9,012 pounds. Most of the nuclear bomb’s weight, more than two and a half tons of it, was the high alloy steel case that held the target assembly at the front of the bomb. Inside the assembly was a target case—three feet long, two feet wide—screwed tight into the front.
Inside the target case was the target insert, eight rings stacked on top of one another like plates, their hollow centers filled with a steel rod that kept them held together within a thick alloy encasement. The stack weighed exactly one hundred pounds. A similar but slightly smaller stack of disks rested at the other end of the bomb. Combined, these disks weighed 188 pounds. This was the uranium. With an average enrichment of 87 percent, the nuclear device held a total of 164 pounds of Uranium-235, all of it enriched at Natanz, under Dr. Kashilla’s direction, over a chaotic, at times danger-filled, decade.
Kashilla had seen eleven of his scientists killed over the years, assassinated by a combination of efforts by Mossad, the CIA, and MI6. He knew the risks of his profession, his mission really, because he himself had been targeted. A magnetic bomb had been attached to his car one morning six years ago by a young Kurd, a Mossad recruit from a village near the Iraq border. Kashilla had watched him do it. After the Kurd pulled his moped alongside the moving car, Kashilla heard the faint click of the bomb being stuck to the door. Kashilla had leapt from the backseat of the moving car, trying to pull his wife with him, just as the bomb had detonated. She had been killed by the blast, along with their driver. Kashilla’s missing right arm was a permanent reminder of that awful day, a day that had driven him to complete the bomb, and to contribute toward the vengeance he knew would soon come.
Behind the target case at the front of the bomb, running the length of it, was a smooth-bore alloy gun tube with walls more than three inches thick, designed for a maximum pressure of 80,000 psi. It was through this gun tube that the stack of Uranium-235 at the tail of the bomb would be fired at the stack at the front, resulting in an explosion the likes of which the world hadn’t seen since Nagasaki.
There were other pieces to the bomb, of course, the uranium deuteride trigger mechanism, tungsten carbide reflectors to amplify the explosive impact of the device, and even some empty space.
As Dr. Kashilla completed running his finger the length of the bomb, the serial beeping of a sideboom crane, backing up, drew closer to where he stood. The crane came to within a few feet, yet still Kashilla didn’t take his eyes off the bomb. The door to the cab of the crane opened and a young man stepped down from the cab and approached Kashilla, placing his hand gently on the scientist’s shoulder.
“Is it ready to be lifted, Doctor?”
“Yes, Alhaam,” said Kashilla. “Take it away.”
14
MARISTELLA CLUB
ODESSA, UKRAINE
In the afternoon, Dewey arrived at the Maristella Club, a modern hotel just up from Arcadia Beach.
A windswept, driving rain had delayed his connecting flight from Prague. He checked in, paid in cash, then went to the suite overlooking the Black Sea. He had less than an hour before he was to be at the restaurant, a place called Khutorok by the Sea.
Dewey glanced out the window. A large swimming pool, shaped in an unusual geometric pattern, like two ovals attached to each other, sat just below the balcony, devoid of people, steam arising into the balmy Odessa air. The ocean was just beyond it, across a small street and boardwalk, the water a black monotone to the horizon. Finally, he went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face.
“Pawnshop,” said Dewey.
They drove through the city. A mile inland, in a neighborhood bustling with pedestrians, shops, and cafés, the cab pulled up to a small, run-down building with strange lettering on a yellow sign; behind the windows were steel bars; a photo of a Kalashnikov was the only indication of what the shop was in business for.
“Stay here,” said Dewey, handing the driver a small wad of cash.
Dewey stepped inside the pawnshop. He looked at a wall of handguns, picked out a used Stechkin APS 9mm, the only handgun in the place with a suppressor. Dewey paid for the weapon and a box of slugs. He asked the clerk for a piece of twine.
Back in the taxi, he loaded the magazine and pushed it into the Stechkin. He laced the twine through the trigger guard, tied it in a loop, unbuttoned his shirt, then hung the gun from his neck. He rebuttoned his shirt and zipped up his Patagonia fleece.
At Khutorok by the Sea, Dewey took a seat at the bar. He was a few minutes early. He ordered a whiskey—even in Odessa they sold Jack Daniel’s—and pounded it down, then ordered another.
He remembered the words from Tobias Meir, calling him at the hotel to tell him of the arrangements.
“Be careful; Odessa is a lawless place.”
The rendezvous had been arranged by Tobias Meir and the reporter from Al Jazeera, a woman named Taris Darwil. Odessa was close to both Israel and Iran, and it was a popular destination for vacationers from both countries. Dewey didn’t know what to expect tonight. On one level, he was here to listen to Qassou and any ideas the Iranian might have for stopping the nuclear attack on Israel. But more important than that was sizing up Qassou, determining if the Iranian was telling the truth, or whether he was a pawn in a larger plot that had already ensnared Meir.
At a quarter of nine, a tall, handsome man with longish black hair, combed back neatly, and olive skin, accompanied by a gorgeous woman with long black hair, arose from their table near the front window. The man paid the bill and, as he walked out, made eye contact with Dewey.