They were pulling up to the gate at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Both he and Eva flashed their photo ID badges, were asked a few questions, and then were waved through.
“How’s it going with Najjar Malik?” David asked as they found a parking space. He hoped he’d be able to see the man again, under much different circumstances than the last time they’d been together. He remembered the scientist’s gentle nature and quiet bravery. He’d been practically peaceful in the midst of uncertainty and danger. Najjar intrigued him — not just because of the valuable information he possessed but because of the character and heart he’d exhibited during the chaos of escaping from Iran.
“Amazing,” Eva said. “I’m supposed to brief the director on that in a few minutes.”
“Good.”
They locked the car and hurried inside. They passed a full security checkpoint, complete with 100 percent ID check, retinal and fingerprint scans, and the passage of their personal belongings through an X-ray and themselves through a magnetometer. When he retrieved his phone, David checked and saw that there were two missed calls. One was from Zalinsky, presumably checking on their progress. The other was from Marseille. The problem was, they were now in a restricted area where all radio frequencies were jammed and no cell calls or text messages could be sent or received. David felt a pang of regret. He wished he had time to hear Marseille’s voice and make sure she was okay, but it would now be hours before that was possible.
“Hey, more good news — NSA just picked up an interesting intercept from one of the satphones your friend Esfahani asked for,” Eva said when they finally boarded an elevator and pushed the button for the seventh floor. “Somebody really high up.”
“Really?” David asked. “Who?”
He was surprised but grateful to hear that the phones were being used. Only a few weeks earlier he had been approached by Abdol Esfahani, the deputy director of technical operations for Iran Telecom, the government-run telecommunications company of Iran, to see if he could obtain twenty encrypted and totally secure satellite phones for senior members of the Iranian regime. It was a key development. The Iranians had previously purchased satellite phones from Russia, then discovered they had all been bugged. Now they wanted state-of-the-art phones that Nokia, the Finnish communications giant, and Thuraya, an Arab phone company, jointly produced. Esfahani, of course, thought David was actually Reza Tabrizi, working for Munich Digital Systems as a subcontractor for Nokia. Senior Iranian officials wanted the same “clean” phones used by members of the EU, prime ministers, and parliamentarians, and they were willing to pay top dollar. With Langley’s help, David had delivered satphones that weren’t bugged but whose numbers could be intercepted by the National Security Agency. He had been skeptical that the phones would actually be used so soon, but he was glad to be wrong.
Eva turned and looked him in the eye. “Ali Faridzadeh.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“The Iranian defense minister?”
“The very same.”
“Who did he call?”
“The French defense minister. Apparently the two went to some private high school together in Switzerland, and they’ve stayed close,” Eva said.
“What did they talk about?”
“Well, that’s just it. The interesting thing was that Faridzadeh said he needed to relay a private message from the Twelfth Imam to President Jackson.”
The doors opened. They stepped off the elevator and turned left.
“The Mahdi wanted to send his personal condolences to the president for this ‘terrible tragedy’ and said he would get to the bottom of it and find out who was responsible. When I read the call transcript, I honestly didn’t believe it at first. I made the guys at NSA send me the audio of the call, but when I finally listened to it myself, they were right. Their translation was precise. And there was more. The Mahdi wanted the president to know that ‘now is the time for peace, not more bloodshed.’ He asked for a phone call with the president and said that now that the Iranians had the Bomb, they felt they were finally in a position to come back to the table and talk about a regional peace accord. He ended with what seems to be an ancient Persian saying: ‘A promise is a cloud; fulfillment is the rain.’”
“Meaning?”
“That’s what the French defense minister asked,” Eva said. “Faridzadeh told him it meant ‘The sky is full of dark clouds just now, but they hold the promise of peace. The Promised One has come to bring peace, and his peace will soon cover the earth.’”
All of the hotels near Dulles Airport were booked.
In fact, because of the storms in the Midwest, there were so many thousands of stranded passengers in DC that Marseille had had trouble finding a vacancy anywhere. When she finally had found a room available at the DoubleTree in Crystal City, she’d booked it instantly. She’d had no idea it was a forty-minute cab ride away from Dulles, and she’d blanched at the fare on the meter when they pulled up. But she had paid without complaining, checked in, and collapsed on the king-size bed in her room.
What was she going to do now? She’d been able to reach her principal back in Portland on his cell phone, and he’d been sympathetic. He’d make sure there was a substitute in her classroom the next morning and asked simply that she stay in touch. If it took a few days for her to get back, it was okay.
“You could use the break,” he said. “Try to enjoy it. Just stay safe.”
Grateful to have a boss who wasn’t a tyrant, she took a few deep breaths and tried to relax. She didn’t want to watch a movie or even turn on the television. The news out of New York was far too depressing, and she’d seen so much of the coverage for the last few hours, she was exhausted by all of it. She wished she could call Lexi and debrief about the wedding and the old friends who’d come. But the woman was on her honeymoon.
How amazing would it be to travel to Jerusalem and Nazareth and Bethlehem and Jericho? Marseille thought. She knew Lexi’s itinerary and couldn’t help but be envious.
Raised Catholic, Lexi hadn’t been particularly religious growing up. But she had been a Near East studies major and had always dreamed of traveling around Israel. After she had prayed to receive Christ with Marseille as a freshman, Lexi had developed an insatiable hunger to study the Bible and visit the lands where Jesus and Paul had walked. Now, with her new husband, Chris, who had just graduated from seminary and was preparing to become a pastor, she was actually seeing her dreams come true.
Marseille wondered if she would ever get married. She wondered if she would ever get the joy of going on a honeymoon with a man she really loved, ever get to travel around the world like her parents used to do. But the very question made her feel worse.
Trying to shake off encroaching feelings of jealousy and loneliness, Marseille got up and walked over to the windows. She half expected to see another office building or an air shaft but was pleasantly surprised by the sight of the Pentagon, such a striking symbol of power and mystery along the Potomac River. Immediately, her thoughts turned to her father and the information she had uncovered upon his death that he had once actually worked for America’s spy agency.
It was a puzzle she wanted to solve. She wondered where the CIA’s headquarters was located. Was it right downtown or out here near the Pentagon? She genuinely had no idea and was too tired at the moment to look it up. But it had to be close, she figured.
That’s when the name Jack Zalinsky crossed her mind. He was the CIA operative who had engineered the rescue of her parents out of Tehran during the Iranian Revolution of 1979. David had been the first to tell her Zalinsky’s name years before, when she practically begged him to tell her more about how their parents had met and escaped Iran together. She could vividly remember saying the name to her father and seeing him wince, almost recoil. He’d refused to discuss it, any of it, but his reaction had confirmed David’s story.