“You’re crazy,” he whispered.
“No, not crazy. Brilliant,” Jeri said. “I like it. Let’s do this.”
My kind of girl. I grabbed one of the suitcases by the handle. Hefted it. “Legend” had it that there were a hundred more of these in existence. Fifty-pound nightmares.
We spent the rest of the day finalizing my plan and talking about our communications pattern once I was on the move. Jeri equipped each of us with a prepaid phone straight from Charlie’s inventory.
“Text messages only,” I said. I thought about that for a moment and added, “Unless all hell breaks, of course.”
At 7:00 P.M., Jeri and I packed the suitcase in the back of the Cherokee, and she drove me into town. She dropped me in the market district, which every tourist crazy enough to come to Qom was obliged to visit. Qom was the religious center of Shai Islam. The city was renowned for its architecture. The horizon in every direction was spiced with mosques and golden minarets, shrines and tombs, religious schools and government buildings. The city made little pretense of modernity the way Tehran did. It was the home of fifty thousand religious scholars from all over the world, including France. That was my cover: Richard Moreau, researcher extraordinaire, specializing in religious anthropology. I hoped I wouldn’t have to lean on it too heavily.
I stopped in a market café to orient myself, set the suitcase on the floor next to me, and hooked my backpack over the back of my chair. I ordered a dish of rice with spiced chicken. I washed it down with a bottle of sparking water. Then I ordered coffee with cream, opened a day-old newspaper, and watched the sun begin to set.
Everyone knew there was a uranium enrichment facility in Qom. Three years earlier, French and English sources had picked up signs that someone was tunneling into the side of a mountain in the desert outside the holy city. And yes, there was a facility there. The debate was whether or not it was being used for peaceful purposes, as The Twelver wanted us to believe. But the size and configuration of this new find, disguised by the Vocational School of Engineering and Science, was completely inconsistent with a peaceful program. My job was to confirm the inconsistency.
I went into my iPhone and opened the photo files of the school and the processing facility, the one file from the NSA, and the one Jeri had provided me. I memorized the layout. The major heat plume recorded by satellite imagery pinpointed a source from inside — or under — the school’s main building. A long, hot streak connected this building to an adjacent one, a student center according to the photos, and a very big student center at that. This was the building, according to Professor Fouraz, where the yellow cake uranium had been delivered. For all we really knew, the trucks were making a delivery of cheese pizzas to the school cafeteria. Right, Jake.
I was willing to bet my house that the long, hot streak revealed a tunnel connecting the two buildings.
The Agency forwarded what they had on the facility. The Iranian Ministry of Education promoted the place as a vocational school for young men and women. Though the school had been in operation for three years, there was no record of anyone who had yet graduated.
By this time, the market was attracting families out for the evening. Tots on bikes, men smoking, women in baggy abayas pushing strollers. It was a scene of urban tranquility, though I wondered about the scruples of a government that constructed a nuclear weapons plant practically under the feet of so many innocent people. Actually, there wasn’t much to wonder about: evil was evil.
The crowd thinned out and night’s darkness thickened.
At 9:15 P.M., I closed my paper, hailed a cab, and placed the suitcase on the backseat next to me. I gave the driver an address a quarter of a mile from the school, at the edge of a residential neighborhood. Simple logic: if you see a man carrying a suitcase, you assume he lives nearby and is on the way home from the bus stop. I hiked north in the direction of the school, my iPhone feeding me directions.
Considering the secrecy surrounding the uranium processing plant, the Iranians couldn’t be obvious in providing security. If the place was meant to be a school, it had to look like a school. Couldn’t be surrounded by a cordon of heavily armed guards. Security systems had to be discreet.
The school complex sat on the edge of the city, on the banks of the Qom River, the desert and low-lying hills forming a backdrop to the north. It was bordered on the south — my left — by a cramped neighborhood of typical lower-income homes. Flat roofs, tiny windows, and mud-stucco walls. A wide dirt road separated the neighborhood from a chain-link fence surrounding the schoolyard, and I paused three hundred feet away. I set the suitcase down next to the trunk of an olive tree. I took my Zeiss digital telescope from my jacket pocket and connected it to my iPhone to survey the area.
The meager illumination came from light sneaking past the curtains of the houses and from the distant security lamps above a guardhouse along the front of the schoolyard.
On the other side of the fence stretched two soccer fields of scraggly grass. Two massive single-story buildings sat two hundred yards inside the fence. Both were constructed from cinder blocks and coated with reflective paint that gave them a reddish brown tint in the light of a new moon.
By my calculations, the school and all the acreage inside the fence — or what lay beneath it all — was probably large enough to conceal a facility whose sole intent was the enrichment of uranium, and not for the wholesome, peaceful purposes that Iran’s government would have liked the world to believe.
I studied the fence. It was woven from top to bottom with innocuous-looking electrical wires that could only have one purpose: conduits for electric current. Probably not strong enough to harm either man or animal, but sensitive enough to set off alarms at police and security outposts both inside the facility and out.
From this vantage I could see an entrance adjacent to the nearest guardhouse. Parked just beyond the guardhouse and well inside the fence was a collection of excavators, trucks, and buses: not an assortment of vehicles you saw at every school in America, and probably not here in Iran, either. I spotted two other guardhouses, one on either side of the schoolyard.
The farthermost of these protected an entrance and road that curved away from the city in the direction of Highway 7. The road from this entrance seemed to fork at a point less than a quarter of a mile from the school. The left fork sloped into a tunnel, which disappeared under ground, away from the prying eyes of satellites hovering 150 miles out in space.
I was still staring at the images brought to life by my telescope when a low rumble shook the earth. I froze.
CHAPTER 18
The rumble grew in volume and I felt the earth quiver under my shoes. From the east, a line of semi-tractors pulling flatbed trailers materialized along the dirt road separating me from the school grounds. Their huge tires tossed clouds of dust that shimmered in the darkness. Each trailer was laden with a massive amount of building supplies. I stepped deep into the shadows and counted pyramids of cement sacks, pallets of plywood, spools of cable, and stacks of concrete pipes. I counted seven trucks and trailers. Two hauled huge generators. One shouldered a mammoth earthmover.
The trucks rounded the corner and turned toward the first entrance. The lead truck stopped at the guardhouse.
A waiting guard checked the driver’s paperwork. Another guard walked along the bed of the truck and waved it forward. The truck rolled toward the excavators. The parade of trucks moved up one truck, and the second truck stopped for inspection, this one heavy with plywood. This was obviously old hat for both the guards and the drivers. Their interplay had all the makings of a bunch of guys who saw one another on a regular basis and maybe even shared a beer after work. Hell, the beer probably came from Charlie’s illegal stocks.