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.
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 was 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.