The Last Refuge (9 page)

“It’s nice to meet you,” said Dewey as he sat down in the chair next to Meir.

Meir stared at Dewey in silence.

“Did someone explain what happened to Kohl?” asked Dewey.

“Menachem Dayan called me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s the way things happen. You were a soldier, were you not? You can’t think like that.”

Dewey nodded.

“I need to know why he was coming to see me,” said Dewey.

Meir stared for several seconds at Dewey.

“Do you believe there are good Iranians?” Meir asked. “Perhaps a guard in the prison who’ll prevent Kohl from being tortured?”

“I don’t know,” said Dewey. “I doubt it.”

“You assassinated Khomeini’s brother,” said Meir. “In Bali, 1988.”

Slowly, Dewey nodded. “How do you know that?”

“We studied it,” said Meir, “in Shin Bet. Why did you kill him?”

“It was an operation,” said Dewey. “I was ordered to do it. I didn’t ask why.”

“Why kill Khomeini’s brother?”

“He was the one charged with funding the different groups that were starting to sprout up. So, it was a message from us. A ‘fuck you’ to Tehran and the mullahs. A way of saying America doesn’t forget. Someone else stepped into his shoes, but there was a certain amount of value in having that person’s name not be Khomeini.”

“It was a masterpiece,” said Meir.

“No, it wasn’t a masterpiece,” said Dewey. “It succeeded, that’s all you can say. I’ve seen piss-poor designs that ended up achieving the objective of the operation, and I’ve seen brilliant designs that go very badly, very quickly.”

Tobias Meir moved his wheelchair across the library’s oriental carpet to a dark mahogany rolltop desk in the corner of the room. He opened the top drawer of the desk, removing an envelope. He wheeled backward and stopped next to Dewey.

“If I tell you something, are you obligated to tell your government?” asked Meir.

“No,” said Dewey.

“Not the CIA?” asked Meir.

“I don’t work for them.”

“So I can trust you?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Dewey, “you can trust me.”

“I’m going to show you why Kohl was visiting you,” said Meir.

Meir clutched the white letter-sized envelope in his right hand. His hand tremored slightly as he held it. He extended the envelope to Dewey. Dewey took the envelope, but did nothing.

“Iran’s president, Mahmoud Nava, has vowed to destroy Israel,” said Meir.

“I know.”

“They say he’s trying to build a nuclear weapon.”

Dewey took the envelope and lifted the flap at the side. He pulled out a photograph. The photo showed a long, roundish object in the back of a semitruck; the object was oval, long, dark silver, with a shiny steel tip. A missile. On its side, in green lettering, something was written in Persian.

“Is it—” Dewey started.

“Iran’s first nuclear bomb,” said Meir.

“Where did you get this?” asked Dewey.

“From an Iranian high up in Mahmoud Nava’s staff. He stole the photo, then reached out to Kohl.”

“Who is he?”

“He works for Mahmoud Nava himself. So you see, there are good Iranians, Dewey.”

“There might be,” said Dewey. “Or it was a trap. Who else have you told about this?”

“Nobody,” said Meir.

“Why not?”

“According to the Iranian, they have a mole inside Mossad,” said Meir. “Nava would launch the nuclear bomb immediately if he knew we had knowledge of it, before we have time to design and execute the operation to destroy it.”

“
Operation?
” asked Dewey. “What operation? If Israel or the U.S. saw this photo, they would immediately blow it up.”

“If they knew where it was.”

“Natanz? Qum?”

“It’s not at Natanz or Qum,” said Meir calmly. “They’ve hidden it. Only Nava knows. He and a few high up in the Revolutionary Guard and VEVAK. And, of course, Suleiman, their psychotic ruler.”

Dewey paused, staring at the photo.

“How did he get this to Kohl?” asked Dewey.

“A woman. A reporter for
Al Jazeera
who came to Tel Aviv and found Kohl.”

“You’re playing with fire,” said Dewey. “You have to tell someone. Dayan. Mossad. Or let me tell the CIA.”

“
No!
” shouted Tobias Meir. “No. If you tell anyone, they’ll launch the bomb before we have time to react. He specifically warned Kohl. You must promise you won’t tell anyone.”

“So what was your plan? What if I hadn’t called you?”

Dewey looked into Tobias Meir’s eyes, encircled by dark crimson, the bruises left by the aftermath of what were undoubtedly too many sleepless nights.

“That is a question I don’t know the answer to,” said Meir.

“What’s written on the side of the bomb?” asked Dewey.

“It says, ‘Goodbye, Tel Aviv,’” replied Meir.

Dewey shut his eyes for a brief moment, then swallowed hard. He reached his hand into his pocket, looking for a cigarette. On the flight to Tel Aviv, he remembered thinking that rescuing Kohl Meir from an Iranian prison was going to be next to impossible. Now it looked easy in comparison.

He felt the thin, sharp cardboard end of the cigarette pack. He pulled one out and lit it, not even asking Meir for permission.

“Do you know how to reach this man?” asked Dewey.

“His name is Qassou. I know how to get a message to him, through the woman.”

Dewey held up the photo of the nuclear bomb.

“I need to meet with him,” said Dewey, taking a drag on the cigarette. “Immediately.”

12

VALIASR AVENUE

TEHRAN

At four thirty in the morning, a small plastic alarm clock made an incessant beeping noise. But the man who it was intended for, Abu Paria, was already awake. He’d arisen a handful of minutes before, as if his subconscious knew something was about to happen. Paria stared at the alarm clock for more than half a minute as the noise pealed in the air and its small light went on and off. Finally, he reached out and hit the button to turn it off.

Paria threw the sheets off and stood up, buck naked. He was a gorilla of a man, his chest, torso, and back covered in thick black hair. Paria’s powerful frame looked like that of a bodybuilder’s. He was a wall of muscle; big, hulking, with biceps the size of grapefruits and a barrel of a chest, legs like small trees. A lifetime’s worth of weight lifting, combined with a decade as a member of Quds Force, an elite unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard modeled on Britain’s SAS. Quds was Iran’s fiercest military weapon, a commando regiment attuned to the climate and exigencies of the Middle East, designed for deep covert strike capability inside the borders of other countries. Quds Force training had been brutal—miles and miles of daily running in weighted-down gear, mountain climbing, survival training, hand-to-hand combat, and always the weights. Recruited into Quds as a twenty-year-old college student, Paria had been named unit commander by the time he was twenty-six.

Paria walked to the closet. On a hook inside the door, he removed a leather belt. He stepped into the middle of the bedroom. With the belt in his right hand, he whipped the belt across his left shoulder, so that the end of the leather smacked across his back, making a loud snapping noise. He whipped himself more than twenty times, each time the stroke became harder and more vicious. His back grew red, though after so many years, it had grown a thick, tough layer of callus. Paria repeated the exercise with his left hand, ripping the leather belt across his right shoulder until he nearly bled, all the time saying nothing, looking forward into a large floor-to-ceiling mirror, staring into his own eyes, without expression.

Everyone knew Paria was tough. Among the people within Iran’s military and intelligence communities, he was widely considered the toughest man in Iran. But even those who considered him the toughest man in Iran, perhaps even the Middle East, had no idea how tough he really was.

He’d begun this sadistic daily exercise long ago, to learn how much pain he could actually endure, how he would behave and react if he was ever captured and tortured. Now he looked forward to the feeling, the utter pain of it all. It allowed Paria to begin his day with the knowledge that he could survive almost anything. It made him remember that he was just another human being; the humiliation and degradation of the lashes transported him to a level of self-awareness that was ultimately degrading, and grounded him. Paria believed it made him hungry, desperate, and brutally effective.

And these qualities were essential in the role he’d been chosen to play a decade ago: director of Iran’s Ministry of National Intelligence and National Security. VEVAK, as it was known, was Iran’s secret police. In theory, it was a combination of the FBI and CIA, focused both internally and externally, but rendered according to Iran’s particularly evil recipe; doing anything necessary to keep Iran’s ruling clergy in power. At the end of the day, it was this role more than anything that guided VEVAK.

Over the years, it was reported that VEVAK had killed more than a million of its own citizens. The truth is, even Paria didn’t know how many they’d killed. He’d long ago outlawed the ministry from keeping such records.

VEVAK was everywhere. As anonymous as the wind, but as powerful and unforgiving as a hurricane. Paria had been chosen by Ali Suleiman, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor, and it was to Suleiman that Paria reported, not Nava. Once a week, Paria walked to the central Tehran mosque where Suleiman lived and worked. There, he sat in Suleiman’s office and updated him on important developments within VEVAK, both inside Iran and abroad. VEVAK was the most important weapon in the Iranian clergy’s fascist-like control over the country.

Suleiman had the ear and instincts of a politician. As such, Suleiman tended to focus his questions to Paria on political developments inside Iran, especially in relation to Iran’s president, Mahmoud Nava. Suleiman despised Nava, thought him volatile, ignorant, and often irrational; yet Suleiman had learned to appreciate the very considerable shield that Nava’s mercurial reputation in international circles allowed him, as Supreme Leader, inside Iran.

It was Suleiman himself who had ordered the dramatic escalation in financial support for Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas. It was Suleiman who asked on a weekly basis how many IEDs had been trucked to the front lines in Iraq, as if keeping a mental count of the tens of thousands of bombs sent by Iran made him sleep better at night. And it was Suleiman who, early on, pushed for the development of a nuclear bomb.

But if Suleiman was the one who controlled the levers, it was Paria who was the lever itself.

After waking himself up with precisely four minutes of whipping, Paria did seventy-five push-ups and one hundred sit-ups. He dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and running shoes. By 6:00
A.M.
, he was in the elevator that took him down to the lobby of his apartment building. He passed the security desk, manned with a pair of handpicked ex–Revolutionary Guards.

“Good morning, General Paria,” said one of the men.

“General,” said the other, nodding.

Paria nodded at the two guards, but said nothing.

“The usual run, sir?” asked one of them.

But Paria didn’t answer the soldier.

He left the building and ran to the right, down the residential street, toward Sorkheh Hesar Park. Paria didn’t reveal information, to anyone, if he didn’t have to. As innocent as the guard’s question was, there was always the infinitesimally small chance that the guard was working for someone, reporting to someone, and that his question could be soon followed up by the appearance of a stranger along his running route, who, from a few hundred yards away, would blow a hole in the back of Paria’s head.

Paria had ordered many such executions over the years. It was a VEVAK trademark. Use informants to learn the daily routine, then penetrate that daily routine, interrupt it, cleanly, efficiently. Kill with one well-aimed bullet. Leave without a trace.

Even though both guards had worked in Paria’s building for more than two years, and even though he knew their backgrounds going all the way back to childhood, Paria entered Sorkheh Hesar Park and ran in the opposite direction, taking a different route around the large, now deserted park.

Paria ran a relaxed five miles, seeing nary a soul on his route.

Back at his apartment, he did seventy-five more push-ups, a hundred more sit-ups, showered, then dressed in his usual attire—steel-toed black military boots, khakis, a short-sleeve button-down khaki shirt.

At 8:30
A.M.
, he climbed into the back of an idling black Range Rover, parked in front of his building. Waiting inside the SUV was a plainclothed man, who handed Paria a Ziploc bag. Paria took it and poured it out on the seat between them as the driver sped away from the building.

“This is everything Meir had on him?”

“Yes, General.”

Inside the bag was a wad of cash, U.S. dollars and Israeli shekels, a car key with a Porsche logo emblazoned on it, a brown leather wallet, and an Israeli passport. Paria reached in and removed the wallet, inspecting it quickly, removing credit cards and examining both sides, then putting the wallet back in the bag. He opened the passport and stared for a few seconds at the photograph of Meir.

“Run the credit cards,” said Paria. “See if they’re dummies.”

“They might set off some sort of notification.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Paria. “He’s inside Evin. They can’t do anything and they’ll find out soon enough, if they don’t already know. Run them. One of them might link to some sort of secret files.”

“Yes, sir.”

Paria held the small black Porsche key in his hand.

“They pay well in Israel, yes, General?” remarked the man.

But Paria didn’t answer. Instead, he held the key and rubbed his finger across the logo, admiring it. Finally, he stuck it in his pants pocket.

As they drove down Resalat Highway, Paria opened a manila folder that was tucked into the back of the passenger seat. Inside, a sheath of papers contained Paria’s daily briefing, including his schedule, press reports deemed by his chief of communications to be relevant, mostly articles about the war in Iraq, and operations briefings, which meant any activities of material nature from field operatives.