David checked his watch. It was 5:44 p.m. He was stunned that Mays and Crenshaw were back so soon — unless, of course, there was a problem. Leaving Fox in charge of the prisoner, David uncocked the pistol, reengaged the safety, and tucked the weapon in the back of his trousers, hidden under his shirt. Then he and Torres slipped out the door to huddle with their men.
“That was fast,” David said, looking at a black 2005 Mercedes ML350 SUV and a silver 2009 Hyundai Entourage. “Any trouble?”
“Piece of cake, boss,” said Mays.
“And you’re positive you weren’t followed?” Torres asked.
“We’re good,” said Crenshaw. “How’s it going here?”
“Not good,” David admitted. “He’s confirmed the Mahdi has two warheads, and he’s saying both are going to target Israel, not the U.S., but honestly he might just be saying what he thinks we want to hear.”
“So what’s the plan?” Mays asked.
“We can’t stay here,” Torres said. “Not for long. We need to keep moving. And first, boss, you need to decide whether you can break him. If so, we can go a little longer. No more than an hour. If not, I say we send Matty here back to the safe house with Javad, ship Javad out of the country, and then have Matt hook up with us again ASAP. So, can you break him?”
“I honestly don’t know,” David said. “There’s nothing I’d like more than to extract actionable intelligence out of this guy. We’ve already risked so much to get him; it can’t be for nothing. But the fact is, Javad is too devout to be conned or bluffed into giving us anything real, anything valuable.”
The room, obviously, wasn’t really a CIA safe house. They didn’t really have with them the computers and files here to make it look like one. That had all been a bluff, and while it had rattled Nouri, it hadn’t broken him. The photos of Nouri in Dubai were real, the result of a brilliant sting operation Zalinsky had put together without even hinting about it to David or Torres. Indeed, until David had woken up in Karaj that morning and seen some of the photos in e-mails Zalinsky had sent, he hadn’t even known about the op. But little good it did them here in Tehran. The notion of the Mahdi seeing the pictures and the video had scared Nouri — seriously scared the man in this case — but it hadn’t broken him either.
That said, there was the safe house in Karaj. It was the real deal, and it had everything they needed — the computers, the files, the audio, the maps, the passcodes, the weapons. Maybe all they needed was for Mays to take Nouri there for a few hours and get Nouri’s fingerprints all over everything. David smiled at the genius of it. If he really wanted to spread panic inside the Mahdi’s operation, that was how to do it. First he had to persuade Zalinsky to let him tip off the local police about Safe House Six. Once the place was raided and the Iranians figured out what it was, the panic virus would spread up the chain of command with breakneck speed. As soon as the Mahdi found out that Reza Tabrizi was a CIA spy and came to believe that Javad Nouri was a CIA mole and that the satphones were a CIA operation from the beginning, the phones would become toxic. No one would be allowed to use them, virtually shutting down the Mahdi’s ability to communicate with his high command in these critical days of the war. It was high risk, but what else did they have?
David turned to Crenshaw. “Any luck with Javad’s phone?” he asked.
“I looked it over, but there’s not much there, at least that I could see. I uploaded everything to Langley to have them cross-check it against their computers and see if anything popped, but I haven’t heard back yet.”
“Where is it now?”
“In the glove compartment.”
“Which one?”
“The Hyundai.”
“Well, it was worth a shot,” David said.
Crenshaw nodded.
“So what’s the plan?” Torres pressed. “We still have one more shot to make Javad talk, right?”
“You want me to really take his kneecap off?”
“That definitely got him thinking, boss,” Torres noted. “I really thought he was going to give us everything. But when you shifted to talking about the Mahdi, I think he decided you were bluffing. That’s when he got all self-righteous and defiant.”
“Most people don’t talk when they’re missing half their leg,” David reminded him. “Most people can’t talk at that point.”
“Javad Nouri isn’t most people.”
“You really think he’ll talk if I do it?” David asked, skeptical of the notion but respectful of Torres’s years in the field.
“I do.”
“If I weren’t here, would you do it?”
“If you weren’t here, I’d have done it already,” said Torres. “Look — this is it. We’ve got two nukes in the field. We don’t know where they are. We’ve got the one person we’re likely to bag who probably knows. And if he doesn’t know where the nukes are, he sure as I’m standing here knows where the Mahdi is. Make him talk. Do it now. And then get Langley to use a Predator to blow the Twelfth Imam and his cronies to kingdom come. That’s the deal, boss. You want to stop a nuclear war? You do it right here, right now. Simple as that.”
Torres made a compelling case, David had to admit. He didn’t believe in torture per se. The information extracted from a torture victim wasn’t always reliable. Often the victim told you whatever he thought you wanted to hear. But this was clearly a moment that called for extreme measures. They were on the brink of nuclear war, and they did, after all, have a presidential directive to use all means necessary to hunt down these two warheads and destroy them.
That said, the risk was enormous. Was there another way to break Nouri? Any other way? He probably didn’t actually know the current location of the warheads, David decided. Even if he had known twenty-four hours ago, or twelve or six or even two hours ago, the warheads had to have been moved by now. Especially now that the Iranian high command knew that Nouri had been captured.
But Torres was also probably right that Nouri knew where the Mahdi was, and if that was the case, the Mahdi and his entire team would soon be packing up and moving somewhere else. Indeed, they could already be on the move. But if they weren’t, this was the CIA’s best chance to take out the Mahdi and destroy the Caliphate once and for all. To hold Nouri and not to inflict any bodily harm against him certainly seemed the humane thing to do, and it meant they would be able to interrogate him over days and weeks and extract precious information about the Mahdi, about the Ayatollah, about the president, and about other high-ranking officials that was perhaps unknowable any other way. But ultimately that wasn’t the mission, was it? The mission was finding and destroying the warheads or finding and destroying the man who controlled them. The humane thing, therefore, meant using all means necessary to protect millions of innocent souls from nuclear genocide.
“All right, you sold me,” David said. “You guys go back inside. I’ll be right in.”
29
Dr. Birjandi, Ali, and Ibrahim were preparing to take a break from their intensive studies of the prophecies about the future of Iran when the phone rang. Eager to talk to David again, Birjandi didn’t hesitate to take the call this time. But he was stunned by the voice he heard on the other end. It was not David Shirazi.
“Dr. Birjandi, please hold for the Grand Ayatollah.”
Birjandi instinctively rose to his feet as he simultaneously snapped his fingers and signaled the men to remain quiet. There was a short pause, and then Hamid Hosseini picked up.
“Alireza,” he said, “is that you?”