That said, his last assignment had been his most effective and personally rewarding to date. On orders from Langley, he had infiltrated Munich Digital Systems (MDS), getting himself hired by the German computer company, which developed and installed state-of-the-art software for mobile phone and satellite phone companies, and establishing himself as a young gun — hardworking and willing to take risks. He’d then been assigned by MDS as a technical advisor working closely with Mobilink, the leading telecommunications provider in Pakistan.
Once on the Mobilink account, David had done whatever it took to get the information asked of him by Langley. He’d penetrated Mobilink’s databases, bought off key employees, hacked his way past advanced security protocols, and mined mountains of data until he began to track down the mobile phone numbers of suspected al Qaeda members operating on the Afghan-Pak borders or living in the shadows of Islamabad and Karachi. One by one, he began to funnel the numbers back to Langley. That allowed the National Security Agency to begin listening in on the calls made from those particular numbers and triangulating the locations from which they were being made. The goal, eventually, had been to track down and kill Osama bin Laden and his top associates, and they had gained real ground. In less than six months, David’s efforts helped his colleagues capture or kill nine high-value targets. In the process, he got himself noticed on the seventh floor, the inner sanctum of the Agency’s senior staff.
But during that time, the Agency’s priorities had shifted significantly. While neutralizing bin Laden had certainly been high on the list at that time, at the top of the list was neutralizing Iran’s ability to build, buy, or steal an arsenal of nuclear weapons. The Israelis were increasingly convinced that they were facing an existential threat from the mullahs in Tehran, that once Iran got the Bomb, they would launch it against Tel Aviv to make good on their repeated threats to “wipe Israel off the map.” The Jackson administration was publicly committed to preventing Iran from acquiring such lethal capabilities. But David knew the president was privately worried even more about an Israeli first strike against Iran.
In January, Jackson had quietly signed a highly classified national intelligence directive authorizing the CIA “to use all means necessary to disrupt and, if necessary, destroy Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities in order to prevent the eruption of another cataclysmic war in the Middle East.” The problem was that while the Agency had a half-dozen special operations teams on standby, ready at a moment’s notice to sabotage nuclear facilities, intercept shipments of nuclear-related machinery and parts, facilitate the defection of nuclear scientists, and so forth, what it didn’t have was someone inside giving them hard targets.
That was why David had been pulled out of Pakistan and sent inside Iran with orders that were as clear as they were nearly impossible to achieve: penetrate the highest levels of the Iranian regime, recruit assets, and deliver solid, actionable intelligence that could help sink or at least slow down Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The good news was that in just a few short weeks, he had already impressed his superiors back at Langley with actual, measurable, demonstrative results, working with Iran Telecom and distributing specially engineered satellite phones to several key government officials. The bad news, from David’s perspective, was that it was all too little, too late. The Iranians had just tested a nuclear warhead in a research facility in the mountains near the city of Hamadan, a facility previously unknown to the CIA. A figure claiming to be the Twelfth Imam, ostensibly resurrected from the ninth century, was convincing a rapidly growing force of Muslims throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia that he was, in fact, the Islamic messiah, yet few inside the CIA had thus far taken seriously the notion of the coming of the Mahdi, much less understood the implications of his arrival to the region or US interests there. The president’s wishes notwithstanding, Israeli leaders seemed poised to launch a preemptive strike at any moment, and David wasn’t sure Prime Minister Naphtali was wrong to be moving in that direction. He vastly preferred that the US take the lead in stopping Iran, but the truth was the president didn’t get it, and even the CIA — himself included — had been behind the curve for years. Now they were out of time.
David was seriously contemplating the possibility of resigning. But it wasn’t merely political weakness and organizational inertia that weighed on him. His personal world was imploding.
For the past six and a half hours, David hadn’t been briefing his superiors in the Bubble, the secure conference room on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters in northern Virginia. Nor had he been preparing his presentation for the White House Situation Room the following day. He hadn’t been reviewing transcripts and recordings of the latest intercepts of phone calls, the fruit of his work in Iran.
He had, instead, been sitting at his mother’s bedside at Upstate University Hospital in his hometown of Syracuse, New York, not far from the house he had grown up in. He was watching the woman who bore him, the woman he loved so dearly, steadily and rapidly deteriorate. She’d been battling stage 3 stomach cancer for months. In recent days, however, things had taken a turn for the worst. David was doing everything he knew to comfort her. He’d held her hand. He’d brought her ice chips. He’d filled the sterile hospital room with the yellow roses she so loved and read Persian poetry to her from a slim volume of verses that was the only personal possession his mother still had from her youth in Iran.
At the same time, David was trying — in vain, it seemed — to comfort his grieving father. He brought him fresh coffee every few hours with a splash of half-and-half and four cubes of sugar, just as he liked it. He returned all of his father’s phone calls, working with his office to reschedule his many appointments for the next few days, and told his father again and again that somehow everything would be okay when he knew very well that wasn’t true.
All the while, David silently cursed his two older brothers, who weren’t here at all, despite his messages imploring them to come quickly. Azad was the serious one. A successful cardiologist like their father, Azad was a busy man, to be sure. But it wasn’t as if he lived on the other side of the country, much less the planet. Azad lived in the suburbs of Philadelphia, for crying out loud. David had MapQuested it. He knew Azad’s house was a mere 257 miles away, door to door. He had spoken to Nora, his brother’s wife, just last night, with the only result being his further frustration.
“David, you know we’d be there if we could. We are grieving at this situation, but it’s just impossible. Your brother is in back-to-back surgeries until late tomorrow afternoon. And I’m scheduled to be induced in two days. Once I’m settled in with the baby, Azad will come right away. He just wants to meet our child. Can’t you understand, David? I know Pedar understands. Maamaan knows we love her.”
How could it be that his mother’s greatest dream — grandchildren — was preventing her from having her firstborn son by her side as she suffered?
Saeed, on the other hand, was the playboy of the family. He probably made more money than the rest of them combined, but he seemed to spend it as fast as it came in. He owned a lavish apartment in Manhattan, was always dating someone new and wasting his money by jetting off on extravagant vacations. Saeed hadn’t been home in ages and only kept in touch if you counted the occasional text message. David didn’t have the slightest idea why Saeed chose this frantic, rootless lifestyle. But he had given up trying to figure it out a long time ago.