I imagined Jimmy would be proud to see me sprint alongside a line of boxcars, preparing my leap toward transportation nirvana. The air trembled and the ground shook from the violence of steel wheels grinding against steel rails, and I realized I was grinning. I matched my steps to the gnashing of the wheels, set my sites on a ladder fixed to the side of an empty boxcar, and jumped.
I swung onto the floor of the boxcar and congratulated myself on a nifty bit of improvisation.
One of the keys to success in any black op is flexibility. I was a manic planner, but a plan was merely a common point from which to deviate. Things can go wrong. You plan for that. Enough had already gone wrong over the last seven days, but the endgame of the plan remained the same. It was the details that had evolved.
That’s why Charlie and I had identified rendezvous points throughout the city. The security apparatus in Iran was as thorough as it was brutal, but speed was not its forte. When the opposition has strength and size, stay nimble and fluid. No, that wasn’t exactly the way Sun Tzu had drawn it up in The Art of War, but it was close enough.
I jumped off the train when it passed under the Azadegan Highway overpass and jogged three blocks to the east along Chitgar Avenue. I settled into a more casual walk when I turned onto Hesar Street. I paused out front of a ubiquitous downtown neighborhood market, smelled baking bread and roasted chicken on the air, and realized how long it had been since I’d eaten. I bought coffee from an open-air bakery and found a bench under a flowering ash tree.
I sent a text of my location to Charlie, thought about a quick update to General Rutledge, and decided against it. What was I going to say? The dogs are on my trail? Like that was some kind of news.
A half hour later, a bread truck pulled up to the curb directly in front of my bench, and one of Charlie’s men glanced out the open door at me. He said something in Farsi, which I took to mean, climb aboard, and that’s what I did. If the bread truck was meant as a diversion, it couldn’t have been more realistic. The scent of freshly baked bread wafted through the cab and nearly made me delirious with hunger. I motioned toward the racks in back, and my driver shrugged as if to say, Help yourself.
I speared two dinner rolls from a plastic bag. They were soft and warm, and I wolfed them down like a man contemplating his last meal. I had two more. These I savored.
We drove deeper into the heart of the city. The streets churned with people. We arrived at the old Mansoor Hotel and parked down the street. The hotel, a broken-down three-story affair on the corner of Laheh and Shrine, was rendezvous number two and our base of operations for the next few hours anyway. I recognized a couple of Charlie’s men loitering by the entrance; I wasn’t keen on how obvious they looked.
Two black Mercedes sedans cruised by and parked in front of the bread truck. Charlie and his bodyguards. Again, way too obvious. I’d have to tell Charlie to dump the Mercedes and find a couple of beat-up Hondas. A moment later, a grizzly bear of a man emerged from the second Mercedes.
He walked up to the passenger side of the bread truck and gave me a tiny nod. I took the nod to mean, Charlie wants to see you. I climbed out of the bread truck and walked to the Mercedes. Charlie sat in the back, a laptop resting on his thighs. I slid in beside him.
“How did the raid go?” I asked.
Charlie tapped on the keyboard. He shrugged. “I was gone by the time they broke in. I’m sure they picked through the merchandise. They always do. Grab a couple of bottles of Canadian whiskey or bag some of the latest electronics. But if that’s the extent of the damage, call us lucky.”
“I wouldn’t count too much on Lady Luck, my friend,” I said. “She might take the day off.”
Charlie turned the laptop in my direction. “Give this a look.”
The screen displayed a fuzzy overhead shot of square buildings squashed together like tenements in Brooklyn. It was an infrared image that was mostly green and black with splotches of yellow, orange, and red that would have made a French Impressionist proud. At the heart of the photo, a yellow-and-orange blossom obscured the largest of the buildings. Charlie tapped the blossom with his index finger.
He explained, “It’s the building you were talking about outside Qom. A school. One of my contacts in Iranian Air Force counterintelligence just provided it. He’ll be hanging from a crane in Vali-e Asr Square if anyone gets wind of it. He didn’t say what it was. Maybe he doesn’t know. But he thought it was important enough to risk his life.”
I studied the image and traced the outline of the bloom with a pen. “When was this taken?”
“Who knows? Not that long, I don’t think. Two months max.” Charlie shrugged. He pointed to the image. “What’re you looking at, Jake? Any idea.”
“This isn’t the heat signature of any school.” I hunted through my iPhone and sent an image via e-mail to Charlie’s computer. When it arrived, he clicked it open and displayed a nearly identical image.
“Looks the same.”
“There’s a damn good reason it looks the same. What you’re looking at there is a North Korean enriched-uranium-processing plant taken six months ago.”
“Which means?”
“Which means there’s more going on inside that school than a bunch of kids sharpening pencils.” This was similar to the information that Chief of Staff Landon Fry had provided me four days back. Now I’d heard it from two different sources.
Charlie clicked back to the first picture. “Here’s what my guy told me. He told me that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad knows there are American recon satellites photographing every square inch of our ill-fated country. No big secret there. And he’s ordered the air force to take measures to camouflage the heat plume.”
Problem was, this IR signature wasn’t conclusive enough to order an attack. Not even close. You don’t destroy a school filled with kids sharpening pencils based on something that could have been altered by a hacker with a couple of months’ worth of Photoshop experience under his belt. I had to verify the source, up close and personal. To do that, I had to get to Qom and get inside the facility, assuming there was a facility.
Now things got tricky. Under ideal circumstances, I wouldn’t even think about undertaking such a thing until I had the MEK traitor out of the way. Until that happened, he or she could very well checkmate every move I made. Under ideal circumstances, that meant working the counterintel until something popped. Too bad these weren’t ideal circumstances.
“We’re going to have to work this thing from two ends, you realize that, don’t you, Charlie?” I said.
He shrugged. “We just hope the counterintel bears fruit before you get a bullet in the head.”
I grasped the door handle. “Let’s get to work.”
Charlie palmed his cell phone and sent a text. Three of his men sprang out of the first Mercedes, laptop bags slung over their shoulders. I hustled out to join them. The raid earlier had cost us hours of precious surveillance time.
The men by the hotel entrance kept in the shadows. They both carried Scorpion submachine guns tucked against their sides. One of them shoulder checked the door and entered. His comrade followed. I was next in line.
I hadn’t taken two steps when the world exploded in a ball of yellow light. A fiery blast knocked me backward six feet. Dust and debris pelted my body. I lay on the ground, stunned, choking, my ears ringing.
Someone grasped me under the arms and dragged me from the hotel. Smoke roiled from the shattered threshold in black waves. One of Charlie’s men staggered out, blood streaming from his ears and gruesome wounds pocking his face, and collapsed. His partner didn’t come out.