“The rationale makes sense to me.” Sure it made sense. The Americans had allowed Israel to keep Arafat a prisoner in the ruins of his Ramallah headquarters for almost two years now. It was logical that the Palestinian would finally strike back. But Arafat also knew he couldn’t break wind these days without half a dozen intelligence agencies catching it on CDROM. So if he’d okayed the hit on the American convoy, it had to have been done through winks, nods, and subtle hand signals. Nothing that could be taken to court.
Then Tom looked at Shahram’s face. “It wasn’t Arafat, was it?”
The Iranian’s expression told the story. “No,” he said. “This was Tehran’s doing, albeit with Arafat’s approval and foreknowledge.”
“Tehran again.” Tom shook his head indulgently. He’d gotten excited over nothing. This lunch was going to be a waste of his time, albeit not his palate. “You always find a way to pin things on Tehran, don’t you?”
Shahram’s thick eyebrows cocked warily. “When Tehran is guilty.”
“And they’re guilty now?”
“I will tell you the truth, my friend,” Shahristani said, slipping into Farsi-accented English. “All this talk of rapprochement between Washington and Tehran is a facade-every bit of it. A smoke screen constructed by Iran in order to confuse and obscure its real goals and intentions.”
Privately, Tom agreed. But he wasn’t about to say so. He was there to elicit and absorb whatever Shahram was peddling, finish lunch, make notes, send them on if they warranted forwarding, and get on with his life. He had flowers to buy. He spoke in Arabic. “Do you have specifics, Shahram?”
The Iranian sipped his water. “I do.”
Tom waited. Shahram smiled. “You are anxious, Thomas,” he said. “Patience, please.” Shahram reached inside his jacket, retrieved a gold-trimmed ostrich leather cigarette case, and laid it on the tablecloth. From his trouser pocket came a gold-and-tortoiseshell enamel Dupont lighter. Shahristani opened the case, took a cigarette out, closed the case, and returned it to his breast pocket, then lit the cigarette and put the lighter back where it belonged.
Finally, he exhaled and turned his head in Tom’s direction. “One: while Khameini makes noises about cracking down on terrorism, he gave sanctuary to more than eight hundred of al-Qa’ida’s fighters after they were displaced from Afghanistan. Two: Tehran allows Ansar-al-Islam safe refuge. Three: the Seppah has infiltrated more than a thousand Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel into southern Iraq, where they are organizing the most radical Shia elements to fight an insurgency against the Americans.”
Tom made a dismissive gesture. “I’ve heard all this from you before, Shahram. Within the past couple of weeks, in fact.”
“And what did you make of it?”
“Nothing more than business as usual for Tehran.”
“Perhaps.” Shahristani paused as handwritten menus were set in front of them. The Iranian didn’t bother looking at his. “Green salad,” he said. “And the sole-grilled, please.”
Shahristani nodded at the menu. The waiter picked it up and looked over at Tom. “Monsieur Stafford?”
Quickly, Tom ordered a beet salad and an entrecôteà la moelle. He wanted to get back to the subject at hand.
“You were saying?”
Shahristani inclined his head closer to Tom’s. “Perhaps it is, as you say, business as usual. After all, despite the fact that your government refuses to admit it, Tehran has waged war against the United States for two decades-ever since the Seppah blew up your Beirut embassy in 1983. But I think things are about to get more serious. I believe the Gaza murders were the opening of a new terror campaign. I think Tehran has begun a long-term covert action against Israel and the West-and they are using some new allies as well as their old surrogates to do so.”
Tom looked at his old friend. It was just like Shahristani to see circles within circles-and Tehran in the middle of it all. “C’mon, Shahram-”
The Iranian’s eyes flashed as he exhaled. He slipped into Persian-accented Arabic. “Listen to me, Tom.Gaza was a Seppah operation. It was only one of a series of attacks.”
“A series.”
“Probes and distractions. Like a sidewalk shell game. You understand that Tehran’s long-term objective is to knock the West off balance, agreed? To obtain nuclear weapons, agreed? To use those weapons to change the balance of power in the region forever, agreed?”
“Agreed, agreed, agreed, Shahram. But what’s your point?”
“It is that short-term, Tehran wants continual destabilization. How better than by a marriage of convenience with al-Qa’ida.”
“Go on.” Despite Tom’s skepticism, Shahram was on solid ground. Tehran was already host to perhaps a hundred of al-Qa’ida’s most dangerous senior-level combatants. And the fact that al-Qa’ida was Sunni and Tehran was Shia, or that Iran was Persian and al-Qa’ida was Arab meant little. In the Middle East, the old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” paradigm still held sway.
“To mark this new alliance, the Seppah will facilitate and help coordinate a major al-Qa’ida strike against the Americans-an attack equal to or bigger than 9/11.”
There he goes again. Tom had heard it all before-and he was hugely dubious. “It’s easy to talk about an alliance between al-Qa’ida and Tehran. I read about it all the time in theTelegraph op-ed pages. It’s a constant litany sung by the neocon pundits. But what about proof?”
Shahristani balanced his cigarette on the rim of the ashtray. He took an elegant, gold-cornered Asprey pocket secretary from his jacket pocket and extracted a three-by-five photograph from it.
“This,” he said. “This is proof.” He slid the photograph across the table.
Tom pulled a pair of reading glasses from his breast pocket and slipped them on. He looked down at what appeared to be a surveillance photo. In the foreground was the blurred hood of a car. Behind the vehicle, two men were walking past a café or bistro with sidewalk tables. One man was slightly in front of the other. Tom looked up, puzzled. “Here.” Shahristani handed him a pocket magnifier.
Tom shifted his wine out of the way, laid the photo on the tablecloth, and squinted into the thick glass, playing it back and forth over the photo. Behind the two figures, he saw an awning with writing on it. Squinting, Tom played with the magnifier. “L’Étrier?”
“Justement.”
“Is this Paris?”
“Yes.” Shahristani drew deeply on his cigarette and nodded. “Rue Lambert in Montmartre.”
“Who’s the mark?”
“There are two of them. Don’t you know?”
Tom shrugged. “Never seen either one before.”
“Yes, you have-one of them you know.”
Tom pulled the reading glasses off and looked skeptically at Shahristani. “Stop playing games, Shahram.”
“They are coming from a meeting at a safe house next door to the bistro.” The Iranian stabbed the Dunhill out, leaned over, cupped his hand across the side of his face so what he said couldn’t be lip-read from across the room. “I believe the man in front to be a mercenary currently working for al-Qa’ida. He was born a Moroccan, of that much I am reasonably certain, although one of his two or three current passports is French, and was issued in the name of Tariq Ben Said, born Tunis, August of 1958.”
“Tariq Ben Said.”
“Yes, so let’s call him that. What his real name is, who can tell. When he was first brought to my attention about three years ago, he was working freelance.”
“By whom?”