“And you, Senator?” Salome said.
“You want to frisk me?”
“I want him to frisk you.”
Duto stepped next to Wells.
Two more guards joined them as Salome led them into the mansion’s fifty-foot-long front entrance gallery, filled with modern art that Wells didn’t recognize, oversize balloon animals, and what looked like a massive pile of Play-Doh.
They walked up a staircase that tracked into a hallway with a half-dozen bubble surveillance cameras in the ceiling. The corridor ended at a windowless door. Its deadbolt snapped back even before they reached it. Salome pulled it open, waved in Wells and Duto. The guards stayed behind.
Inside, a square white room that Wells guessed was Duberman’s outer office. Televisions displayed the casinos that formed the 88 Gamma empire, mostly night shots taken from helicopters. Their hotel towers were fifty stories or more of black glass and white neon, sleek futuristic cylinders that dominated the cities around them. Interspersed with the photos were corporate statistics: 88 Gamma had 49,000 employees in eighteen countries, yearly profits of $3.2 billion, a stock-market value of $60 billion. And Duberman owned almost half of it. No wonder he could afford to spend $200 million on a presidential campaign. He wasn’t the richest man Wells had ever met. That honor, if honor was the right word, belonged to King Abdullah. But he was certainly the richest self-made man.
And the richest enemy.
Aside from the pictures, the outer office had two desks for assistants who were nowhere in sight, plus a white couch where anyone who got this far could wait to beg Duberman’s favor. Based on its spotless leather, few people did. More than ever, Wells wanted to meet Duberman, see for himself what drove the man. If he could.
Salome knocked on the inner door. It opened fractionally. She murmured in Hebrew. Waited. Turned to them. “Come.”
22
Since the first American drone strike, the Iranian government had said it would never meet the President’s demands to open its nuclear program. Both publicly and through the French foreign ministry, which was secretly passing messages between Tehran and Washington, Iran insisted it would not even consider negotiations until the United States retracted its invasion threat.
But the previous afternoon, the Iranians had seemed to blink. The French Foreign Minister, Marie le Claire, called Green herself. “Behzadi says he’ll meet you tomorrow, if you wish.”
Fardis Behzadi was an Iranian parliamentary deputy, one of the few Iranian politicians trusted by both moderates and hardliners. As a teenager in Tehran in 1979, he had helped lead the takeover of the American embassy. Four years later, as a junior officer in the Iran — Iraq war, he had lost both legs to a mine, forever ensuring his revolutionary bona fides. At the same time, he was known to believe that Allah gives us life, but full bellies make full hearts. Unpoetically translated, the slogan meant the Shia regime wouldn’t survive unless it improved the Iranian economy and reduced unemployment.
Behzadi couldn’t negotiate a deal himself, but Green could be certain that Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s president, would hear whatever she told him. “Best news I’ve heard all week.” She was tempted to agree on the spot, but her own president might not approve. “Give me five minutes.”
She needed only two.
“This guy’s the real deal?” POTUS said.
“The realest. Sir.”
“Go, then.”
They agreed to meet at 2 p.m. the next afternoon at Istres — Le Tubé, a big French air base near the Mediterranean coast. They would each bring one advisor/translator. No guards. The French would handle security.
Their only disagreement came over where exactly they should meet. Neither would board the other’s plane. They were less worried about being kidnapped than taped. But neither wanted to give the French a chance to record them, either. Ultimately, they agreed to talk on the tarmac, a ridiculous but necessary solution.
Once she’d iced the details, Green spent a half hour going over talking points with the President and the SecDef. The only other officials who knew about the meeting were the DCI and the CIA’s top Iran expert, a forty-something man named Ted Rodgers who would go with Green and serve as her translator and advisor.
Unfortunately, Rodgers couldn’t give her much insight into what Behzadi might want. The CIA had no reliable sources inside the top ranks of the Iranian government, much less the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force. And in recent years, the Iranians had grown expert at keeping the National Security Agency out of their computer and telecom systems. The NSA believed that military and Quds Force commanders used a network of motorcycle couriers to send written notes to one another. The couriers functioned almost as a mail service, running both point-to-point and through a central facility outside Tehran.
So Rodgers had no better idea than anyone else why Behzadi had asked for this meeting. Still, Green was glad to have him along. He spoke perfect Farsi and knew every detail of Behzadi’s biography.
To preserve secrecy, Green insisted on flying on a NetJets charter rather than an Air Force jet. The Secret Service objected. Only sat connection is in the cockpit, her security chief told her. You’ll be unreachable.
I’ll manage, Green said. She didn’t tell him she saw the lack of coms as a positive. For the first time in the years since she’d taken this job, she would have a few hours to herself.
She spent the hours before her flight reading the plans for the war that would come if her meeting failed. The attack would begin with two days of bombing raids and missile strikes to knock out Iran’s fighters and air-defense systems. On the third day, with complete air superiority, the Air Force would level the Iranian nuclear reactor at Bushehr and attack border garrisons, setting the stage for a ground invasion at dawn on the fourth day. The 82nd Airborne Division would strike from Turkey while three Marine regiments would advance from Iraq, close to thirty thousand soldiers and Marines in all. They would aim for Natanz and Fordow, the two complexes where the Iranians performed their most important nuclear work. Both were close to the holy city of Qom — and, not coincidentally, near the geographical center of Iran, hundreds of miles from any border.
Rather than trying to take both at once, the 82nd and the Marines would converge on Natanz, the most crucial site of all. Natanz was an underground factory housed inside a military base, protected by more than ten thousand soldiers and the best air-defense system anywhere in Iran. The United States would depend on speed and airpower to take Natanz within five days of crossing the border. Over the next forty-eight hours, the Marines and the 82nd would search and destroy the facility while using the base’s airfield to resupply their troops and evacuate their wounded. They would then fight north to Fordow, the second crucial enrichment factory, where they would repeat the drill. They would then retreat almost five hundred miles south to the Persian Gulf for evacuation.
The 75th Ranger Regiment and a fourth Marine regiment would be held back in case the first invasion forces ran into trouble. If neither did, the twenty-two hundred Rangers and four thousand Marines in the reserve would be flown into Natanz to reinforce the initial units for the second half of the fight. Still, the total invasion force would be only about one-twentieth the size of the Iranian army, which included three hundred fifty thousand soldiers and an equal number of reservists. Of course, the United States had far superior weaponry, battlefield surveillance, and communications, but the sheer numerical imbalance was not comforting.