“That’s affirmative, sir.”
“Does anyone there know he’s coming?”
“Only General Jazini, sir.”
“Excellent,” Darazi said. “And the Mahdi? What is his status?”
“We just heard from Mr. Rashidi, sir. He says they seem to be on track for a noon arrival.”
“Very good. And the preparations at the Imam Khomeini Mosque? How are they coming along? We haven’t much time.”
“Actually, I just spoke to the watch commander on site,” Asgari said. “The new war room there is now fully operational. We’ve been shifting personnel over there for the past hour, and they are ready for you as soon as you’re ready to depart.”
“You have a helicopter waiting?”
“It just landed upstairs.”
“Then what are we waiting for, Commander? Let’s move.”
David said a silent prayer for his father and for Marseille, then forced himself to stop thinking about them and return to the pressing matters at hand. He and his team began discussing how best to penetrate the Al-Mazzah air base, but it was soon clear they were getting nowhere.
Yet as David and his men kept considering various scenarios — all of which were built on the premise that the president of the United States was not going to authorize any additional help for them to accomplish their mission — David found himself thinking in an entirely new direction, though he said nothing as he continued to drive. Was there a way to make contact with the Israeli government? Was there a way to tell them that the two warheads were at Al-Mazzah and that the Mahdi would be there soon? At this late hour, the only way he could envision stopping the Mahdi from unleashing a second Holocaust was if the Israelis attacked the Syrian air base. If the Mahdi was dead, would any of his underlings really launch 345 nuclear missiles at Israel? Would the Pakistanis let them? It was a gamble, to be sure, but was there a better scenario? David couldn’t think of any.
Going through with it — making contact with the Israelis and giving them top-secret intelligence — would be tantamount to treason. If by some miracle he lived through this nightmare, he could never marry Marseille and live happily ever after in Portland or wherever. He would be sent to a maximum-security prison for the rest of his natural life for breaking who knew how many laws.
But did any of that really matter? Didn’t he have a moral obligation to help the Israelis save themselves from another Holocaust? There was no question in his mind that he did. The only question at this point was how he could contact them. The most logical answer was to use Tolik and Gal, the Mossad agents in custody back at the Karaj safe house. But that meant getting Mays involved. Indeed, his entire team would have to know, and David couldn’t send them all to prison. They couldn’t know. None of them. Not Mays. Not Torres. Not Fox or Crenshaw. If he did this, he’d have to go it alone and pay the consequences alone. That much was certain.
By the same token, he couldn’t let Zalinsky or Murray or anyone in the chain of command at Langley know what he was doing. They’d never let him get away with it, and like his own team, he respected them too much to endanger their lives or careers. He didn’t always agree with his superiors, but he respected them enormously.
Making his decision to help save the Israeli people felt almost as liberating as receiving Christ as his Savior. Indeed, he was certain that somehow the two decisions were related, though he had neither the time nor the training to understand quite how at the moment. He only knew that when he died and went to heaven and stood before the Jewish Messiah in heaven — probably today — he wanted Jesus to know he had done everything in his power to protect the Jewish people.
The critical question was how best to proceed. How could he make contact with the right people in the Israeli government? He didn’t know a soul in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. He’d never even been there, and he couldn’t very well call 411 and ask some operator for the personal phone number of the Mossad chief or the prime minister. Still, as he continued to race through the deserts of western Iraq, David pored over every conversation he’d had with Zalinsky over the years, hoping to remember a name and number of someone he could connect with. Yet he was coming up blank. He thought back through his previous assignments, desperately looking for a scrap he could use in this present moment.
His first posting fresh out of CIA training at the Farm in rural Virginia had been as some assistant to the assistant to the deputy assistant of whatever for an entire year at the new American Embassy in Baghdad. That had been about as boring as he could imagine. Then he’d essentially been a fetcher of lattes for the economic attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. Lame. Then he’d been transferred to be a communications and intelligence liaison in Bahrain for a SEAL team assigned to protect U.S. Navy ships entering and exiting the Persian Gulf. It had sounded cool when he first heard about the job, but it hadn’t been nearly as interesting as he’d hoped. Nor had it put him in contact with anyone in the Israeli military or intelligence services. The same was true of his work in Pakistan, hunting down al Qaeda operatives. Looking back, it seemed strange that he hadn’t crossed paths with Israelis, but as best he could recall, he simply hadn’t.
He began to wonder if he should have brought Tolik Shalev along for this mission, though he quickly ruled it out again. Still, if he could talk to Tolik in private…
Then David remembered something Tolik had said almost offhandedly before they’d set out for Syria. Tolik had alluded to the fact that Israel’s mole inside the Iranian nuclear program had “called in” the precise locations of the warheads, allowing Naphtali to order precise air strikes. Was it possible, David wondered, that the mole could have had access to one of the satphones David himself had supplied to the Mahdi through Abdol Esfahani and Javad Nouri? Was it possible that the mole had used one of those satphones to make contact with his Mossad handlers? He would have had to, David concluded. How else could he have been certain the Iranians wouldn’t be listening in on his call?
Still, if that were really true, that would mean the NSA had a recording of the call, wouldn’t it? Did the team at Fort Meade actually have it buried in mountains of recordings they were ill-equipped to process fast enough and thoroughly enough? Had it been translated? Had it been analyzed? If not, could they find it?
The faster David processed the questions, the faster he seemed to drive. But he certainly wasn’t worried about getting pulled over by an Iraqi police officer. They were miles from civilization and cruising across the desert at nearly a hundred miles an hour. In another hour or so, they would be at the Syrian border. But then what?
David’s pulse quickened at the possibility of establishing contact with the Mossad, but first he had to carefully and delicately extract the right information from the NSA supercomputers. How? His only contact on the translation team was Eva Fischer. Did he dare bring her into his plan? He didn’t want to harm her, either. Perhaps there was a way to get the information from her without making her privy to how he was going to use it.
He had to call her, he decided. He had to try, at least. But he could only make the call when the rest of his team wasn’t listening. Which meant he had to make the call when he — or the others — were out of the car. Which meant he couldn’t call Eva until they got to the next town and stopped again for fuel and bathrooms. Yet the next town wasn’t for another eighty kilometers, and David wasn’t sure he could wait until then.
41