“It’s about the aces,” Tom said. He meant the circuits boards.
“Yeah, I know. The one’s I took from him weren’t the only ones, were they?” It may have sounded like a guess, but it wasn’t. Not after what I’d seen in Natanz. “Spit it out. I’m a big boy.”
“Big Tuna was a decoy. Six hours ago, we learned there were actually forty-eight aces. While we were busy tracking Big Tuna, another player hit the ground with twenty-four more.”
“Makes sense. It was way too easy.” I told him about the seven unaccounted-for Sejil-2 missiles.
“Okay, priority one is their TO,” he said, meaning the missiles’ targeting orders. Tom looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, and his next statement sounded a bit like a man running on empty. “If there are any.”
“I think it would be pretty dumb to assume otherwise, don’t you think?”
“Roger that.”
“I’m on it.”
“I know you are,” he said. “Keep the ball rolling, my friend.”
“Fast and furious.” We hung up.
I made a second call. Mr. Elliot must have had his finger on the Call button, because I heard his voice after a single ring. “You’ve been on with Orion,” he said. Orion: General Rutledge.
“You’ve been eavesdropping.”
“Which reminds me. Send a note to our friend in Virginia, will you? Catch him up before he has a heart attack,” Mr. Elliot said. “And it’ll give me a chance to see who he’s talking to.”
“Will do,” I said. “Remember Panama City?”
I heard a short, discerning pause. Not a question, just a rapid shifting of gears that took him back nearly three decades. He said, “Oh, you mean when everyone and their brother showed up at our party uninvited.” When he said everyone, he meant the ATF, the DEA, and a couple of guys from the FBI. “Jumped into our op with bullhorns blaring and bells clanging. What about it?”
“J.K.” These were the initials of one of the Iranian drug cartel’s bagmen at the aforementioned “party.” His name was Jilil Kasra.
“Good-looking kid. Bright. Yeah, I remember.”
“I need a photograph.”
Mr. Elliot didn’t ask why. If I made the request, it was important. He didn’t ask by when. If I made the request, it meant as soon as possible. “Already done.”
He hung up. I looked at Charlie and said to him, “Tell me about your eyes and ears in National Security.” I was talking about the woman Charlie had recruited years ago to keep him informed about the comings and goings of Iran’s infamous security service.
He nodded. “Jannata. What about her?”
“We need her to find an old friend of mine named Jilil Kasra.”
CHAPTER 22
Mr. Elliot delivered Jilil Kasra’s photograph in less than twenty minutes. It was a twenty-seven-year-old mug shot that the Panama City, Florida police had, by pure luck, transferred to microfiche twenty-some years back instead of destroying it.
That’s where I’d met Jilil Kasra, in a Panama City jail cell after the boys from Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives blew up an op I was running out of South Bimini.
The ATF didn’t get the guys my op had been targeting; in fact, all they really managed to do was scare off the guys my op was targeting. Not their fault. Instead, they’d ended up with Jilil Kasra, two other twenty-something Iranian bagmen, and me.
They threw us into a holding cell. I had a couple of days to kill before Mr. Elliot did his thing and got me released, so I spent the time getting to know Jilil. No, I wasn’t being nice. I was working. I saw a potential asset. In exchange for Jilil’s cooperation, Mr. Elliot got two years trimmed off his four-year sentence.
I’d stayed in touch with Jilil even after he returned to Iran. I had kept track of him until the shah was deposed, and then he’d disappeared. Maybe he was dead. I didn’t think so.
We transferred the photo onto Charlie’s computer. He and Jeri stared at it. “We need to find this guy,” I said. “He was government back in the shah’s day. But he changed his name when the ayatollah took charge.”
“Better than dangling from the end of a crane in the middle of Revolution Square,” Jeri offered.
“I won’t argue that.”
“And you want me to show this guy’s picture to Jannata hoping for what exactly? Like maybe she ran into him in some government cafeteria eating hummus and grape leaves?” Charlie said. The guy had a sense of humor, but I was too exhausted to laugh.
“I want her to run it through the government’s labor-pool records. You and I both know that National Security watches their own people as close as they watch anyone else.”
“Closer,” Jeri said. “And a photo search wouldn’t be that uncommon.”
Charlie shook his head. “She’ll need a reason. And a good one.”
“Charlie. If you ask Jannata, she’ll come up with a reason. That’s why you pay her,” I said. “And if you need to tell her how important it is, tell her.” And then I thought to add, “Because it is.”
We had to wait until morning before Charlie could make contact with Jannata, so we traveled back to Seyfabad via helicopter. The trip took an hour and thirty-five minutes, and Jeri kept the chopper so low to the ground that the barren hills off our port side looked like angry waves on a dirty brown sea. The girl knew how to fly.
Charlie made his call to Jannata as we drove from Seyfabad toward the city. They had a system. Jannata always carried a prepaid phone. Charlie’s people smuggled thousands of them a year into the country, and the black market sold them like hotcakes.
“One of my really hot numbers,” Charlie said about the phones. “I like my people to carry them, too. We change Jannata’s out every ten days, just to be safe.”
Charlie caught Jannata on her way into the office. It was a one-sided conversation, but I didn’t get the impression that she was all that excited by his request. I heard him say, “I’m sending the photo over right now. Check your phone. Download it, and then toss it. Call me as soon as you get a hit. And, Jannata. Top priority.”
Jannata called Charlie back from a bus stop across the street from the Ministry of Interior forty-three minutes later. By then, Charlie and I had twelve men in position just waiting for orders.
Jannata had chosen the location intentionally because that was exactly where Jilil Kasra acted as the department’s deputy minister, a very powerful position. He was on the eighth floor, corner office, facing our way.
“His name is Pasha Fardin,” Charlie said. “Any reference to your guy Jilil Kasra was lost during the revolution. Very convenient.”
“He’s done well for himself,” I said.
“I wish he hadn’t done quite so well,” Jeri chimed in rather sarcastically. “A deputy minister? Sure be a lot easier to get to him if he was the janitor.”
“But a janitor wouldn’t have any information about an impending attack on Israel,” I said without an ounce of emotion in my voice. “And that’s exactly what he’s going to tell me.”
Charlie twisted his head around and stared at me from the front seat. I caught Jeri’s reflection in the rearview mirror, and her eyes were cold and calculating. She said, “Your powers of persuasion must be off the charts, Jake. And I want to be there when you ask him.”
Charlie was holding his cell phone against his chest. “So, what do I tell Jannata? I assume you have a plan.”
“She needs to get Jilil a message without waking up the entire security apparatus. So it can’t be sent electronically or over the phone.”
Charlie shrugged. I loved it when he shrugged, because it meant the answer was as plain as the nose on my face. “She could hand deliver it. If someone’s making inquiries about someone in the Ministry of Interior, she’d probably want to investigate it in person, wouldn’t she?”