Few people on the planet knew David Shirazi’s real identity.
Not a single person in the White House, State Department, or Pentagon knew. Only four people in the Central Intelligence Agency knew, and Roger Allen, the director, wasn’t one of them. The truth was that David was the CIA’s top NOC — nonofficial cover agent — working deep inside Iran. He was known to the president of the United States by the code name Zephyr. He was operating as a German passport — holding telecommunications specialist by the name of Reza Tabrizi, and he had penetrated deeper and faster and higher inside the Iranian government than any agent in CIA history. The question, however, was whether any of that mattered. If Zephyr succeeded, few would ever know, and he was legally prevented from ever saying so. But if he failed, the impact could be cataclysmic.
Some 6,331 miles away from the White House Situation Room, in a CIA safe house not far from Tehran, David could feel the enormous weight on him growing. He desperately wanted to deliver for his president and his country, but he also increasingly believed failure was the more likely result.
He had miraculously escaped the burning Jamkaran Mosque in Qom only to very nearly die at the hands of an Israeli fighter pilot he was trying to rescue. Now, three days later, he was back at the safe house. He was unharmed — but he worried he was being ineffective as well.
David wondered if the president or the secretary of defense or the secretary of homeland security or anyone inside the American national security establishment who was cleared to even be aware that Zephyr existed knew Washington’s inside man was the youngest and least-experienced NOC the Agency had ever deployed.
Except for his age, David was in many ways the Agency’s dream recruit. He was tall, athletic, and brilliant, with a near-photographic memory, multiple degrees in advanced computer science, and a near-perfect fluency in Farsi, Arabic, and German, aside from American English, his actual mother tongue. His parents had both been born and raised in Iran and had raised David with a rich cultural heritage that now helped him hide in plain sight inside their native country. His father, Dr. Mohammad Shirazi, was a renowned and highly successful cardiologist. His mother, Nasreen, had graduated in the top one percent of her class at the University of Tehran and had been offered full scholarships to study and eventually teach at almost every institution of higher learning in her country. But she turned down all the scholarships and instead took a job working as a translator for the Iranian Foreign Ministry under the Shah on various U.N. issues, rising rapidly in her division and winning a dozen commendations. Later, the Canadian Embassy recruited her to become a translator for them, a post she eagerly accepted, working her way up to the role of translator and senior advisor to several Canadian ambassadors.
When the Shah was overthrown and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power during the Islamic Revolution in the early, chaotic months of 1979, the Shirazis feared for what their country was becoming. They couldn’t bear to see the growing bloodshed and the tyranny that was engulfing their homeland, so they fled, helping an endangered American couple escape as well. Eventually the Shirazis received asylum in the United States as political refugees, and later they achieved full citizenship. They settled in central New York and established an entirely new life.
No one in David’s family — not his parents and not his two older brothers — could ever have predicted what he was doing now. Indeed, only David’s father knew his youngest son worked for the Agency and was operating deep inside Iran. David had told him only recently, swearing him to secrecy.
With short-cropped jet-black hair, olive skin, and soulful brown eyes, David may not have been born in Iran, but he was straight out of central casting. He seemed to instinctually understand the culture and the rhythm of Iranian society, and it hadn’t been difficult for him to appear a devout and increasingly fervent Shia Muslim, even a devotee of the Twelfth Imam. And the cover story his handlers at Langley had cooked up for him had been effective. None of his contacts or sources imagined for a moment that he was an American, much less a spook.
But no matter how well-bred or prepared David was for this mission, it had now come to a screeching halt. Israel was under attack from multiple directions, and the Israelis were fighting back with overwhelming force. David was safe, at least for the moment, but he had no idea what to do next.
He picked up his phone and dialed again. But for the thirty-sixth call in a row, no one answered. Another voice mail, another dead end. A moment later, he dialed a thirty-seventh number and waited. Again no one answered. He tried the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth but got voice mail each time. Slamming down the phone, he continued pacing around his tiny room, seething. Indeed, it was all he could do not to throw the phone against the wall or out the window. Where were all the sources he had so carefully cultivated? Where was Daryush Rashidi, the president of Iran Telecom? Where was Abdol Esfahani, Rashidi’s operations deputy and closest ally in the country? Where was Dr. Alireza Birjandi, who despite his age and blindness had been by far David’s most helpful source? Why weren’t they answering their phones? Why weren’t they feeding him information? He hadn’t even been able to reach Javad Nouri, the man he had rescued just three days before. He needed a breakthrough. He needed a miracle. He couldn’t just sit around doing nothing. There had to be more he could do. But what?
Against enormous odds, David had done everything the Agency had asked of him over the past few months. He had taken enormous risks. He had gambled his own life — indeed his own soul. But what good had it really done? He hadn’t been able to stop Iran from building a single nuclear warhead — they’d built nine. He hadn’t sabotaged Iran’s nuclear facilities to at least slow down their progress. He hadn’t stopped the war from starting. Now the entire Middle East was on fire. The American economy was at risk of plunging back into a recession, as was the global economy, if the war continued. Oil prices had already shot past $325 a barrel, and gasoline back home was now $7 a gallon and certain to go higher. Israel’s skies were raining rockets. Iran’s skies were raining bombs. And here he was, holed up in Safe House Six just outside Tehran.
David had a first-rate CIA paramilitary unit that had come to help him. But he had no new information, no new leads, and no idea what to do or where to go next. For three days they’d been sitting around making calls and sending e-mails and text messages and making pot after pot of coffee but effectively twiddling their thumbs. David couldn’t stand it any longer. They had to move. They had to take action. They needed a target. They needed a mission. But Langley wasn’t giving them one, and he was out of ideas.
He was tempted to call Jack Zalinsky at Langley, but what was the point? Zalinsky was eight and a half hours behind him in Washington, D.C., which meant that while it was 8:40 in the morning here in Iran, it was only ten minutes past midnight at CIA headquarters. The only reason to call Jack at this hour would be to provide critical information, not to ask for any, and that knowledge set David on edge all the more.
The last seventy-two hours had been wrenching on so many levels. The images he kept seeing of the war around him were hellish, and he seemed to have no ability to affect it. If that weren’t enough, just when he should have his attention laser-focused on the grave task before him, he’d had the wind knocked out of him with the news that halfway around the world his mother was now gone, having lost her battle with stomach cancer. Stuck inside war-ravaged Iran, he had missed the memorial service and the burial. His phone message and brief conversation with his father seemed pitifully small in light of his father’s loss.