He’d failed.
Wells turned out the bedside light. He closed his eyes, and for sixty seconds thought of the jet’s passengers. Then he made himself forget them. Nothing else to do.
A light knock stirred him. The room door swung open. “Nice opsec.” Ellis Shafer’s gravelly, mumbly voice. The lights flicked on.
“If it came to that, I could kill you in my sleep, Ellis.”
“Hitting you hard?”
“I’m all right.” Wells pushed himself up.
“Of course you are.” Shafer sat on the bed next to Wells. “They probably didn’t even know what hit them. Except the captain. Obviously.”
“You should be a grief counselor.”
“Should I tell you they’re in heaven with seventy-two million virgins each?”
“Ellis—”
“Too soon?”
Wells had been raised Christian but converted to Islam more than a decade before, in the mountains of Pakistan. Shafer was a Jew who had declared his atheism at his bar mitzvah more than fifty years earlier. Unlike Wells, he still worked for the CIA. Barely. Until one of the new director’s new men got around to dropping off a letter of resignation for him.
Over the years, Wells and Shafer had worked together on a half-dozen operations.
But they had never faced a mission as tricky as this one.
A few weeks before, Iran had begun a secret campaign against the United States. Assassins working for the Quds Force, the foreign intelligence unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, killed a CIA station chief. Then the Guard smuggled radioactive material onto a Pakistani ship bound for Charleston, South Carolina. Fortunately, a rogue Guard colonel tipped the CIA to Iran’s efforts, enabling the Navy to intercept the ship in the Atlantic.
Then the colonel gave the agency an even more disturbing piece of intel. He said Iran had moved three pounds of weapons-grade uranium to Istanbul. The uranium was ultimately destined for the United States, according to the colonel, who called himself Reza.
Wells and Shafer knew that the truth was very different. Iran had nothing to do with the killing of the station chief, or the smuggling. Reza wasn’t a Revolutionary Guard colonel at all. He worked for a private group trying to trick the United States into attacking Iran. A billionaire casino mogul named Aaron Duberman had paid for the operation. Duberman hoped to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon that it might use against Israel. Iran regularly threatened to annihilate the Jewish state, and a nuclear weapon would make the threat real. Even if Iran never used the bomb, its mere existence would give the country new freedom to launch terrorist attacks against Israel.
Since the fall of the Shah in 1979, the United States had stood firmly with Israel against Iran. Now the relationship between Washington and Tehran was warming. The White House had recently agreed to loosen economic sanctions against Iran. In turn, Tehran promised to stop work on its nuclear weapons program. But those promises in no way satisfied Duberman and the mysterious woman who was his chief lieutenant. They had decided to force the United States to act by fooling the White House into believing that Iran was trying to smuggle the pieces of a nuclear weapon onto American soil.
Wells and Shafer had unraveled the scheme in the last couple of weeks, after Wells tracked down Glenn Mason, an ex — CIA case officer who had betrayed the agency to work for Duberman. Senior CIA officials refused to consider that Mason might be involved, for a reason that at first seemed airtight. Mason had been reported dead in Thailand four years before, and the death report appeared genuine. Mason hadn’t used his passport or bank accounts since. In reality, Wells discovered, Mason had undergone extensive plastic surgery, so he could travel without setting off facial-recognition software.
After chasing Mason across three continents, Wells finally found him in Istanbul. But Mason turned the tables, capturing Wells and imprisoning him in an abandoned factory. Wells spent a week in captivity before killing Mason and escaping. Wells assumed that the Turkish police would find Mason’s body at the factory, setting off an investigation that would unravel the plot.
Instead, Duberman’s mercenaries disposed of Mason’s body and cleaned up the factory, leaving police with nothing to find. Wells and Shafer had no other evidence to prove that Duberman was involved.
Meanwhile, the plot was close to success.
Tests conducted by the Department of Energy had shown that the weapons-grade uranium the CIA found in Istanbul didn’t come from any known stockpile. The DOE and CIA agreed that Iran was the only logical candidate to have produced it. Kilogram-size chunks of highly enriched uranium didn’t exist in private hands. And Iran had worked on nuclear weapons for decades, doing everything possible to hide its efforts from international inspectors. The United States and Israel had repeatedly unearthed hidden enrichment plants over the years. But Iran was twice as big as Texas. No one could say for sure that every plant had been found. In fact, Iranian exiles had told the CIA of rumors that the government had opened a new plant deep under central Tehran.
Despite his fears of starting another war in the Middle East, the President decided he had to accept the reality of the Iranian threat. In an Oval Office speech, he gave Iran two weeks to end its nuclear program or face an invasion. To support his threat, he ordered drones and stealth fighters to bomb Tehran’s airport. Congressional leaders in both parties backed the President. Ironically, the earlier deal with Iran increased his credibility. A man who wanted an excuse to invade Iran wouldn’t have spent years trying to end sanctions.
China and Russia protested the American attack on Tehran, but neither country offered any military aid to Iran. Afghanistan and Turkey, which had long-standing rivalries with Iran, agreed to allow the United States to use their territories as bases for American forces who might eventually invade. The rest of the world stayed on the sidelines. Most countries seemed to think the United States and Iran deserved each other. One was a fading empire that used its military too often, the other a dangerous theocracy that couldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons.
Iran responded furiously to the American threat. Its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave a two-hour speech accusing the United States of lying to justify an invasion: “Iran shall never open its legs to the filthy Zionist-controlled inspectors. Our people will gladly accept martyrdom. The Crusaders and the Jews will suffer the fury that they have unleashed…”
Now someone had shot down an American plane. Iran was the obvious suspect. And the Islamic Republic had a history of terrorism against the United States.
Shafer turned on the television. CNN was replaying the explosion yet again.
“Think it was Duberman?”
“A couple hundred civilians wouldn’t stop him, if he thought it would fuel the fire.”
“On the other hand…” Shafer didn’t have to finish the thought. The Iranian government might also have downed the jet. The fact that it was innocent of the nuclear plot made it more rather than less likely to lash out. From Iran’s point of view, the United States had created fake evidence as an excuse for an invasion. Iran was not likely to wait for American troops to cross its borders before it took revenge.
“We have any idea where Duberman is?” Wells said.