There had been times when I ran three or four ops at a time. I could have been circling the wagons on an arms-smuggling ring in Mexico and targeting a band of Chinese heroin dealers in Washington, D.C., while working the Iranian cartel in Florida and a trafficking operation out of Bangkok. The bottom line was always intel. Gather it, package it, send it off to Mr. Elliot to analyze and act upon. It wasn’t my job to figure it all out, but figuring it all out more or less came with the territory. Figuring it out helped me plan my next move. Figuring it out kept me alive.
That’s what I was doing now — staying alive, completing the mission.
“Knowing what we know now about Qom, it has to work this way,” I said. I was really talking to myself, even though Charlie had settled in next to me on the couch. I jabbed a finger at the big rigs in the photos. “The trailers carry enriched-uranium ingots made in Qom. Once the ingots arrive in Natanz, they’re fabricated into warheads.”
I had transmitted the photos from the enrichment facility in Qom to General Rutledge and Mr. Elliot the moment we landed in Kashan, but I hadn’t heard back from either of them yet. I knew it would take some time. I had handed them intel no one had ever seen before; they were probably creaming all over themselves trying to figure out what to do with it.
Charlie clicked to the next group of photos. This batch depicted a convoy of panel trucks, again escorted by unmarked SUVs. It came with an audio link. “Let’s hear what the good professor has to say about these.”
He clicked the link. I recognized Professor Fouraz’s voice, and it didn’t take a guy trained in voice recognition to hear the strain. He was saying, “These trucks are on their way to Natanz. That I know for sure.”
“And the payload?” I asked, as if he were sitting across from us.
“From everything I have been able to find out, they’re hauling special tanks containing deuterium. Collected in the heavy-water facility at Arak.”
I waited for more, but the audio link had closed.
“That’s deducing a lot from a couple of panel trucks,” I said. Deuterium was a hydrogen isotope used to slow neutrons inside nuclear reactors: a good thing. More ominously, it was used to boost the yield of a nuclear bomb.
I clicked to a third series of pictures. These showed long cylindrical objects lashed to flatbed trailers and covered with acres of some reflective material. The shapes were identical to the one Fouraz had shown me yesterday. Sejil-2 ballistic missiles. Had to be.
But instead of speculating, I clicked a second audio link. In this one, the professor’s voice was more clipped, more urgent. “These are casings for Sejil-2 ballistic missiles.” Bingo. “Twenty-one such missiles were delivered this month to the underground facility in Natanz.”
I shook my head, though it wasn’t surprise I was feeling. “Ahmadinejad is fielding a strike force, Charlie.”
“You need to get in there,” he said. His cell phone rang. He came to his feet and put the phone to his ear. He spoke Farsi to whoever the caller was, and I sensed some annoyance in his voice. When he was done, he snapped the phone closed like a man who had spent too much time away from his business. He said, “I’ve got a problem with a shipment of Toyota car parts.”
He turned on his heels and left me alone in the room. Good. I needed the privacy. I checked my iPhone. There was a call tag from General Rutledge marked “urgent alert.” I guess pretty much everything was going to be urgent from here on out. I activated a secure video uplink. The general wore his gray camouflage uniform, and I could heard engines rumbling in the background.
He jumped right into the call. “Excellent intel. I won’t ask how you got it.”
“Your guys see it the way I did?”
“Roger that.” In other words, proof positive that Ahmadinejad was manufacturing enriched uranium at a rate that far exceeded his domestic, commercial needs. “The son of a bitch finally did it. He’s got nukes. We’re going public with it.”
He didn’t mean “public” in the conventional sense. He meant that the information would be going to fellow intelligence groups in Israel, England, France, and probably a half-dozen other nations.
“There’s more,” I said. I told him about the deuterium, the enriched uranium, and a battery of twenty-one missiles that apparently had arrived in Natanz over the last month.
Rutledge squinted. I sensed his mind wrestling with the implications.
“Okay,” he said. I heard the profundity in that one word and calculated the intensity in his gesture. Conclusion? He was about to hit me with another round of fun and games. Just what I needed. “The Iranians need more than enriched uranium to make viable weapons worth mounting on a Sejil-2 missile. You know that. They have yet to build a working bomb because they’re not going to waste the time or money making a weapon they can’t deploy.”
This was all open-source information. You could hear it on FOX News. I waited for the twist. Tom said, “One bottleneck in fielding a credible strike force is collecting enough precision electronics needed to arm and fuse the ballistic nuclear warheads.”
“I’m with you,” I said, meaning, Get to it, my friend. The clock’s ticking.
The general reached off the screen to touch an unseen button. “Which brings me to him. Take a look.”
A jumble of colored pixels replaced Tom’s image. The pixel resolution coalesced and sharpened into a photograph of a man standing next to an airline ticket counter. I recognized Atash Morshed, the online banker from Amsterdam responsible for laundering Iranian drug money and funneling it back into their weapons program.
“The photo you’re looking at was taken at the Beijing airport six days ago. It took that long for the computers to put two and two together.”
“That’s why I’m so fond of computers,” I said with razor-sharp sarcasm.
“Then you’ll appreciate this,” Tom said. “See his briefcase? Our agents in China have hard and fast evidence that our Amsterdam friend was in town, shopping product.”
He didn’t need to say that Morshed was shopping for special microelectronic circuit boards. The very type needed for finalizing the nukes. It was obvious.
“Our friend’s face wasn’t a priority fit until we finally got it on a fast track. Our guys in China made the connection the same day.”
“Good work.” I meant it.
“Our online banker has made a fortune laundering money and smuggling drugs using Iran as a conduit. At some point you have to pay the piper.”
“So it doesn’t take much to speculate that Ahmadinejad finally called in his marker and sent our friend on an errand to buy the components.”
Tom nodded. “We need verification.”
“You think he’s in Iran,” I said. I meant Morshed.
“The timing fits. And if he’s in Iran with circuit boards meant for those Sejil-2s…”
“Then Natanz is probably on his itinerary,” I said. “High stakes.”
“The highest.”
“It wouldn’t hurt for me to have a picture of those circuit boards. Can you make that happen?”
“I’ll send a close-up with the model number.”
I stared at his face. “There’s something else. What is it?”
“Our friend in Virginia isn’t happy. You’ve cut him out.”
“I’m not going there. He’s compromised. Or someone on his team is.” My voice could not have been calmer. “I’m more concerned about our friend on Pennsylvania Avenue.” I was talking about Landon Fry, the president’s chief of staff. “He jump ship yet?”