I carried my food over to Charlie’s room, and we ate in silence.
The one thing Charlie’s guys had provided for him that they hadn’t thought to give me was a bottle of brandy. He filled two glasses with two-finger measures, and we made a silent toast.
Charlie rolled the brandy around his glass and then held it under his nose. “Ah,” he said, his first word in twenty minutes. Then he drank. I wasn’t quite so sophisticated in my approach, but that did nothing to diminish my appreciation for the drink as the warmth of it spread in my stomach.
“So?” he said after another minute. “What’s the plan?”
My first instinct was to keep everything close to my chest. The closer, the less messy, and things had gotten plenty messy over the last week or so. On the other hand, I still needed Charlie, and so far he’d been there at every turn. I’d asked him for his trust, and he’d delivered.
“Visiting day tomorrow.” Same as my message to Rutledge.
“Qom,” he said simply.
“No choice.” I gave him a brief outline of my plans to infiltrate a facility that, by all evidence, was hidden beneath a high school housing a thousand students.
“A school. That’s as fucked as it gets.” He unwound from his chair and stood up. He padded across the room to a teapot resting on top of a hot plate. He poured two cups. He handed one to me and said, “Let’s talk strategy.”
“Qom is southwest some ninety miles. We set up shop outside the city.”
“I’ve got a place,” Charlie said.
“I go in a couple of hours after dark. Not so late as to pique anyone’s interest, but not before things have settled down at the school.” I glanced at Charlie. “You’re my backup.”
“Let’s get a map in here.” Charlie buzzed one of the guys in his crew and told him to bring in a computer. “With a plug-in,” I heard him say.
In less than five minutes, we had a detailed map of Qom and the surrounding countryside up on the room’s television screen. Charlie invited two of his team to join us. The first I had seen at the surveillance site this morning, the stubby guy with the bow tie. “You remember Amur.” We nodded.
The other was a woman who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six by my estimate. She was intense, sinewy, and tight-lipped. She wore canvas-colored cargo pants and an olive tank top. Captivating. She had soldier written all over her. “This is Jeri,” was all Charlie said. “She’s our eyes and ears from Qom. Runs my operation there.”
We shook hands. Jeri settled in front of the map.
She pointed to a village on the outskirts of the city. “Seyfabad. We have a warehouse there with transportation and supplies. Your Russian delivery is already there.”
“Excellent. Thanks.”
“You have a French passport, yes?”
“I’m a tourist with a thirty-day visa.” I opened my coat and extracted Richard Moreau’s passport. I held it out.
She studied it like someone who had needed similar false credentials. “Good. Very good. There are a dozen French companies in Qom and who knows how many French scholars at the university. We also get a steady stream of French tourists.”
“They’re some of my best customers,” Charlie said with a proud grin.
“Of course they are. Cheap bastards,” I said, matching his grin.
Jeri handed back the passport. “ETD?”
I glanced back at the map illuminated on the television screen and said, “We’ll leave in the morning, first light. I need some sleep. And we don’t want to be on the road in the middle of the night. Too obvious.”
“Agree,” Charlie said.
We were on the road at 7:07 A.M. according to my watch. Jeri drove and seemed perturbed by our late departure. I took this as a good sign and apologized. She glanced at me in the rearview mirror and nodded.
She handed Charlie a manila envelope and said, “Photos of the school from twenty-two different angles. If there’s a full-blown uranium enrichment facility somewhere in the area, they’re doing a great job of concealing it.”
Charlie sat in the front seat, smoking a black cigarette. Jeri kept the window cracked. We had traded the Honda for a Jeep Cherokee, and I was spread out in back with my backpack. Charlie’s computer guy had forwarded a file containing the photos of the school, a blueprint of the interior, and a detailed street map of the area surrounding the school to my iPhone. I had added these to the aerial photos that the NSA had provided me.
“I thought you might want to see the originals,” Jeri said of the photos.
Charlie broke open the envelope and handed me nearly fifty photos. Qom was ninety or so miles southwest of Tehran down Highway 7, a stretch of asphalt through flat and arid desert dotted with neat, two-story farmhouses amid groves of olives and pistachios. Seyfabad was eight miles closer.
“It’s good you’re going in as a researcher,” Jeri said as I studied the photos. “Anyone with an interest in Shia studies is considered, well, I was going to say a friend, but that’s a bit of an exaggeration.”
“Less of an enemy?” I suggested.
Jeri shrugged. “Close enough.”
We drove in silence after that. I placed the photos on the seat next to me and tried to match them up with the blueprint of the school’s interior. We were halfway to Seyfabad when we spotted a convoy of panel trucks heading in the same direction. From a distance, the trucks looked damn similar to ones I had seen in Professor Fouraz’s photos — trucks he suspected were carrying yellow cake uranium.
“Ease back,” I said to Jeri. The trucks had an escort of unmarked Nissan SUVs, and it would not have surprised me at all if they were filled with men in National Security uniforms. “We know where they’re going.”
Jeri was not happy about slowing down, but she only had ten minutes to fume before reaching Seyfabad. It was a dumpy commercial hamlet that showed only mild signs of life at this time in the morning. Charlie’s warehouse was one of ten or twelve served by a railroad. His stood out from the rest because there was a small helicopter moored on a concrete pad out back, a pen with guard dogs, and a man patrolling the roof.
Charlie Amadi ran a very tight criminal operation that moved everything from electronics to gourmet food, but he was also a serious businessman. One look at his warehouse and the store of legitimate and illegitimate wares inside — everything from athletic shoes to gas barbecues — told you that he could probably stay afloat for real even if the drugs, liquor, and arms went south. Which they never would, of course.
There were pallets stacked to the ceiling — I didn’t ask what they contained — three forklifts, and a shipping office. That’s where we huddled. That’s where the crate from the Russian mafia had been stored. It looked pretty innocuous from the outside. Jeri and I used crowbars to crack it open. Inside it were two very ordinary-looking metal suitcases banded with leather straps and brass buckles. The buckles may have looked ordinary, but without the appropriate codes, they couldn’t be opened without rendering the device inside useless. Good thing Mr. Elliot had provided me with the codes.
“What do we got here, Jake?” Charlie’s voice had a resigned and fatalistic edge to it. “You gonna tell us what we helped you smuggle into the country?”
“The Russians call them suitcase bombs. One-kiloton nukes, Charlie. Every intelligence agency’s worst nightmare.” Might as well spell it out.
“No way,” Jeri said. She stepped up and ran a hand over the cases. “These things are just … just what? Propaganda, right? Legend?”
“Do these look like legends to you?” I said.
“And you’re taking one of these inside Qom with you, aren’t you?” Charlie said. Not even close to a question.
“It’s just a backup, Charlie,” I said. “Failure’s not an option. If I don’t get out, I take the place down with me.”