“He and I are having a face-to-face later today. A full update.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
I hung up. “Politicians.” The word came out more like a hiss. And why not. Snakes, every one of them.
I had no sooner disconnected the call with General Rutledge than my iPhone flashed two message prompts. The first was from Tom and contained a stock photo of the Chinese circuit board in question, listed as model number 378-98NB574. The Chinese didn’t mess around. The 378 was a ten-layer board so thin and light that you would expect it to crumple in a stiff breeze. They were protected with some sort of laminate material that I didn’t recognize and resistant to temperatures up to five hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The boards were ten-by-six, which meant Atash Morshed would need a small suitcase or a decent-size briefcase to transport them. This struck me as important. It meant that the product could travel from Beijing to Natanz and never leave his sight.
But maintaining anonymity in Natanz was not as easy as it might have been in a larger city. Natanz, for all its notoriety, wasn’t much more than a collection of settlements a half hour southeast of Kashan, and an hour northwest of Esfahan. It lay at the junction off Highway 7, and no more than forty thousand people called the place home. The Karkas Mountains formed a rugged, ten-thousand-foot background to the town and its collection of shrines and ruins. Besides the nuclear facility tucked in the mountains south of town, the one thing the people of Natanz liked to brag about was the inauspicious fact that Darius III was murdered there. I couldn’t find a historian who agreed with them, but why put a damper on their one claim to fame.
I heard a brief knock on the door, and Charlie peeked his head in. He had what looked like a diplomatic pouch in his hand.
“A courier from MEK chief Yousef Bagheri just dropped this off,” he said, placing the unopened pouch in my hand. “It looks like Professor Fouraz came through for us.”
I realized I was holding my breath as I broke the seal on the pouch, which suggested a reliance on an outside source that made me very uncomfortable. There were three pieces of documentation inside. The first was a single sheet of typing paper with six numbers laid out in a series of three written on it: 43-6-120. A short note read: Natanz entry code.
The next thing the pouch revealed was an employee ID badge for the Natanz nuclear facility in the name of Avan Javaherian, complete with a magnetic strip and a photo: mine. Just as long as no one asked me to pronounce Avan Javaherian …
Charlie was right. The professor had come through. I let my breath out. At least this time I wouldn’t be stowing away in the back of a semi loaded with concrete pipes and hoping the guards were too lazy to search them.
The last thing in the pouch was a delivery manifest for roofing tiles. I showed it to Charlie. “Leave it to me,” he said, just as my phone rang. “I’ll give you some privacy.”
“Five minutes,” I said. When the door closed, I picked up. It was Mr. Elliot.
“Your cover’s all set,” he said. His call was twelve minutes late, which was an eternity for my longtime case officer. I thought of chiding him, but detected a minor strain in his voice that convinced me otherwise. “I’ve arranged for you to join a group of Canadian archaeologists on their way to visit the Natanz ruins. But you’ve got to bus it. Their bus will be in Kashan in forty-five minutes. They’ve got a short stop at the Āghā Bozorg Mosque. That’s where you get onboard.”
“Nice,” I said.
“What’s not so nice is that, unlike Qom, security in Natanz is obvious and omnipresent, my friend. Cloak and dagger will only get you so far.”
I told him about the security code and the employee ID, and a minute bit of tension drained from his voice. He said, “Okay. Good progress so far. Push, but don’t press, right?”
I smiled. I hadn’t heard that one in years. “Good advice,” I told him.
By the time I signed off, both Charlie and Jeri were back in the room. Jeri updated me on the lures she and our counterintelligence team were laying for the twenty-six remaining candidates for traitor-of-the-year honors. “We’re using physical rendezvous points tomorrow night that we’ll be monitoring, all in central Tehran. I’m using every spare man we have.”
“We’ll have him within two days,” I said confidently. Then I told them my plans for entering Natanz posing as a French archaeologist.
“I like it,” Charlie said.
“But that doesn’t account for my delivery into the Natanz facility, and it doesn’t account for my other suitcase, Charlie.”
“Jeri’s taken care of that,” he said, glancing her way.
Jeri used the computer to pull up a street map of Natanz and the access roads leading to the nuclear facility. She pointed to a warehouse district north of town and traced a route to a railroad siding. “Here. Look for a white pickup truck. A Daihatsu. Your luggage is already onboard.”
She forwarded the map to my cell phone and said, “Now if you just looked a little more French and a little more like an archaeologist.”
“And you’re traveling too light. Looks suspicious,” Charlie said. He went to the closet and came back with a rolling carry-on. He stood the carry-on in front of me. “It’s got some extra clothes of mine and some toiletries. Nothing you can’t pitch if necessary.”
“And there’s one thing missing,” I said.
“Like what?”
“If I know my Canadian counterparts as well as I think I do, I imagine they might get thirsty on the long road to Natanz. Helping them out might be the neighborly thing to do, don’t you think?”
Jeri grinned; she had an amazing smile. Charlie waltzed over to the room’s liquor cabinet — an impressive collection of imported spirits that reminded me that Charlie had his hands in every possible form of contraband — and returned with a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon.
“Perfect.” I packed the bottle in the carry-on and zipped it closed.
“One more thing,” he said, nodding to Jeri. “Show him.”
Jeri reached into her jacket pocket and withdrew a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife in a thin leather sheath. “A little added firepower,” she said.
“Apparently,” Charlie said, “an MI6 agent used this to settle a gambling debt. Said it once belonged to a British commando from World War Two. As the story goes, it drew plenty of Nazi blood over the course of the war. Sounds like a lot of value-added bullshit to me.”
I inspected the blade. It was sturdy, razor sharp, and perfectly designed for close-quarters combat. I fastened the knife and sheath around the inside of my left ankle, tucked it inside my sock, and hid it beneath the pant cuff. “Let’s hope I don’t need it.”
Charlie drove me to the Āghā Bozorg Mosque. I presented my Canadian passport to the archaeological group’s minder, a woman from the Ministry of Tourism and certainly a part-timer with National Security. The head of the group was a balding, stooped man who introduced himself as Dr. Jeffrey Carlyle from the University of Manitoba. He was clearly suspicious of the latecomer to his entourage and asked too many questions too quickly.
“Thanks for having me onboard,” was pretty much all I said as the minder herded all twenty-three of us — college professors, students, and a couple of amateurs — onto a very comfortable tourist bus.
I sat near the back. Dr. Carlyle took a seat across the aisle, where his game of stink eye continued. I didn’t mind. I was more interested in the mounting evidence identifying the doctor as a day drinker: red nose, ravaged skin, spiderweb eyes.
Halfway to Natanz, I retrieved my carry-on from the overhead rack and unzipped the bag; I made sure our minder wasn’t looking. The bottle of Knob Creek bourbon lay swaddled in T-shirts, and I made sure Carlyle got a glimpse of it.