“Amen,” they replied.
“Good. Now, let us get back to our study.”
Eva Fischer glanced at her watch. It was 4:17 in the morning. She had been awake for only a few hours, and she was still trying to make sense of the stunning turn of events. She had gone to sleep in a basement cell in the CIA detention center in Langley. Now she was staring out the rear window of a black Lincoln Town Car driving through Maryland, exiting Route 295, and driving past a large green sign marked NSA Employees Only.
She was still fuming over her “discussions” with Tom Murray, though she didn’t hold him personally responsible. All that had happened in the last few days had been Zalinsky’s fault, not Murray’s. It was probably too much to expect that Zalinsky would be seriously reprimanded, much less fired, for what he had put her through, but a girl could dream, couldn’t she?
But Eva didn’t really want to waste her time thinking about Zalinsky. Her thoughts turned instead to David Shirazi, aka Reza Tabrizi. She had helped craft his cover story. She had been with him on his first trip inside Iran. She wasn’t technically David’s handler — that was Zalinsky’s role — but she had been one of David’s closest allies. It was she who had supplied him with much of the research he needed in the field. It was she who had secured the satphones he’d needed and personally brought them to him in Munich. It was she who typically maintained direct communication with him, she whom he had turned to when he needed a Predator drone to save his life. True, she had hesitated at the time, but in the end she had done what she thought was right, and she’d do it again.
It had almost cost her job. It could have put her in prison for several years. She was glad to have been exonerated and compensated, but the whole experience had left a bitter taste in her mouth. She had answered all of Murray’s questions. She had signed all the documents. She had, in the process, cleared the CIA of all wrongdoing. But she was not going back to Langley. That was out of the question. Still, she couldn’t abandon David now. His life was in extreme danger. He needed her now more than ever.
She asked her driver to turn up the heat a bit, which he did. Soon they were clearing through a guard station and a 100 percent ID check and entering the grounds of the sprawling National Security Agency campus, less than an hour north of Washington, D.C., and about half an hour southwest of Baltimore.
It was a dark and moonless night, bitterly cold, with a howling easterly wind. A fresh blanket of snow lay on thousands of cars still parked in the 18,000-car parking lot, and Eva realized these people had not gone home, probably in several days. Nearly every light in every building was on. The Middle East was in a full-blown war, and Eva was encouraged to see the NSA humming with activity.
Three men were waiting for her at a side entrance. As the Lincoln came to a stop, one of them opened her door and shook her hand.
“Eva, hi. I’m Warren McNulty, chief of staff for General Mulholland. Welcome to the Puzzle Palace.”
“Good to meet you, Warren. Sorry to keep you up so late.”
“Believe me, we’ve been here and awake the last few days,” McNulty replied, helping her out of the car. “Never a dull moment, I’m afraid.”
He introduced her to the two armed guards at his side. One was assigned to him full-time. The other, he explained, would be assigned to her whenever she was inside NSA headquarters.
“Expecting trouble?” she asked.
“Wartime protocol,” he explained. “Come on, let’s get you inside, where it’s warm.”
McNulty — who Eva guessed was in his midforties and likely a former Marine, well built, in good shape, with a closely cropped haircut and piercing blue eyes — handed her a temporary badge and a hot cup of coffee and gave her a quick briefing on security protocols as they stepped on an elevator.
“General Mulholland will want to see you when he gets in around six,” he said, pushing the button for the top floor. “I’ve cleared out an office just down the hall from his, right next to mine. It’s nothing fancy, of course. We didn’t have much heads-up that you were coming. But it’s clean and quiet and secure, and I don’t have to tell you what a high priority we’ve given your work.”
“Thanks; that’s very kind,” Eva said, taking her first sip of coffee and finding herself surprised that it was a Starbucks dark roast with a hint of hazelnut creamer, just the way she liked it. Someone had done his homework.
A moment later, they passed through two more security checks — one getting off the elevator, the other as they approached the suite of offices of the NSA director, General Brad Mulholland, and his senior staff — before arriving at Eva’s new office.
McNulty was right — it was nothing fancy. Indeed, Eva half suspected it had been a supply closet an hour earlier. It was small and cramped, and it had no window. But there was a desk with a lamp and a computer workstation, a phone, and a stack of files at least three feet high. Eva opened the top file. It was a transcript of an as-of-yet-untranslated Farsi satphone call, intercepted less than an hour earlier.
“All of these are untranslated?” she asked in disbelief.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Don’t you have other Farsi translators?”
“Five — though one is in the hospital with a burst appendix, so four, really.”
“Are they here, in the building?”
“Of course,” McNulty said. “Downstairs. Their names and extension numbers are all on that sheet by the phone.”
“Why aren’t they working on these?”
“Because they’re working on stacks even higher than this.”
“You’re kidding me,” said Eva, feeling completely overwhelmed.
“Wish I were,” McNulty said. “Listen. I’ll tell you what I told them. There’s no way you’ll be able to translate all of this word for word, type it up, proof it, and transmit it to Langley, much less do that with all the other intercepts that are coming in hour by hour. So at this point the general is asking that you simply start scanning these as fast as you can. Make notes in English on any that stand out. If something is hot, call me or one of my deputies. Again, names and numbers are on that sheet. You’ve got to triage this stuff. Top priority is anything that refers to the warheads, anything that references a possible strike on the U.S. or Israel or any other regional target, and anything that comes from the troika at the top — the Mahdi, the Ayatollah, or President Darazi. Got it?”
Eva took a deep breath and another sip of coffee and found herself wishing — at least for a moment — that she was back in her cell in the detention center at Langley, sleeping soundly and relieved from such an enormous burden. “Got it.”
“Good,” McNulty said. “You hungry? Can I get you something from the commissary? They’re open round the clock this week.”
“No thanks. I’m fine for now.”
“Okay. I’ll check in with you in a few hours. But call me if you strike oil.”
“Will do.” She sighed, then sat down, picked up the first transcript, and got to work, already overwhelmed by how much she had to do and how little time she had to do it.
22
David speed-dialed Zalinsky, who picked up immediately.
“Please tell me you’ve got something, anything,” Zalinsky said.
“Only a hunch, but I need your permission to move on it,” said David.
“What is it?”
“A little while ago, I actually got through to Javad Nouri,” David explained. “He’s weak but definitely recovering. I couldn’t get much out of him over the phone, but he said something curious.”
“Like what?”
“He said the Twelfth Imam had come to visit him in the hospital.”