The Tehran Initiative (6 page)

The president didn’t answer. He was coughing up blood.

* * *

The corner office erupted with gunfire.

Secret Service sharpshooters had found them. They laid down a withering blanket of suppressive fire, and Firouz felt a wave of fear ripple through him for the first time. He pressed himself to the floor, against the front wall—out of sight, or so he hoped—pleading with Allah for mercy.

But Rahim was not so lucky. Firouz looked on in horror as his best friend’s body was ripped to shreds by dozens of the 7.26mm rounds that came crashing through the windows. He watched as Rahim collapsed to the ground, blood spraying everywhere, his eyes rolled back in his head. His first instinct was to crawl to Rahim’s side to see if he was still alive, but the fire kept coming, and from a high angle—most likely from the roof of the Waldorf.

When the shooting paused—just for a moment—Firouz made his move. He scrambled across the floor and dove into the hall. Almost immediately the gunfire erupted again. But Firouz rolled around a corner unscathed. Breathing hard, his shirt soaked with sweat, he pulled a silencer-equipped pistol from his jacket, jumped to his feet, and raced for the stairwell.

* * *

“We’re going to get you out of here, Mr. President.”

Gritting his teeth, Bruner forced himself back to his feet. With the help of three other agents, he hauled Jackson to his feet as well. That was when he first saw the blood trickling down the side of the president’s face. But this was no place to do a proper assessment. Parts of the ceiling were already starting to collapse. They had to move. Nearly choking on the smoke, Bruner considered their options. The flames were the thickest to their left and right. The only way forward was to head deeper inside the hotel. He had no idea who or what lay ahead, and he couldn’t rule out the possibility of a multiple-front ambush. But at the moment, he didn’t have a choice.

With their guns drawn, agents were racing toward them from all over the building. Bruner shouted orders to his men to surround and cover them and then began moving the president down the hall and around the corner to an unmarked freight elevator as quickly as they could. Inside, he hit the button for the basement level and cursed until the doors shut and they started descending.

“Six-One, Six-One, I have Renegade,” Bruner shouted into his radio. “I repeat, I have Renegade. We are Code Red and inbound. Hold all radio traffic and prepare to evacuate immediately.”

When the elevator door opened, they were met by four more agents brandishing Uzis. Together, they raced Jackson through the narrow passageway deep underneath the Waldorf until they reached Track 61. There, waiting for them, was an idling Metro-North train. It was already running and loaded with more heavily armed agents and a medical crew. Bruner got the president on board and directed his men to put him on the floor, out of sight. Two physicians began treating him immediately. But Bruner refused to be a sitting duck. He ordered the train to pull out.

The doors closed. The agents around them took up their preassigned positions. Engine One began to move. They had practiced this for years, beginning in 2002 when the Secret Service had run an extensive exercise using this escape route in the lead-up to President Bush’s stay at the Waldorf during the opening session of the UN General Assembly.

But Bruner had never really imagined having to get the president of the United States to a secure, undisclosed location underneath Manhattan via the tracks leading to and from Grand Central Station. Now it was happening, and everything was moving so fast. People lay dead and dying above them. Friends of his. World leaders, perhaps.

Bruner realized his hands were covered in blood, and he could taste more blood in his mouth. Then he heard one of the doctors shouting for silence.

“The president’s blood pressure is dropping fast.”

6

Syracuse, New York

David Shirazi had been born for this moment.

With a photographic memory, a 3.9 GPA, and advanced degrees in computer science, the Syracuse native could have been recruited by the CIA’s Technical Services Division or the Agency’s information-management team and would have been exceptional working for either. Instead, fluent in Arabic, German, and Farsi—the language of his parents’ native Iran—David had been recruited and trained to serve in the Agency’s National Clandestine Service, formerly known as the directorate of operations.

For his first two and a half years in the field, he had served faithfully in a variety of posts inside Iraq, Egypt, and Bahrain. Each assignment had been fairly mundane, but they had proven good training grounds. They’d allowed him to make mistakes and learn from them, allowed him to learn from more-seasoned operatives in the region, and allowed him to understand the dynamics of Mideast politics and the rhythms of the “Arab street.”

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.

All he knew was that as the youngest of the three boys, he had done almost an equally lousy job of being a loving, devoted son. None of them knew the life he was really living. None of them knew he worked for the CIA or that he was spending most of his time inside Iran. They all thought he was a computer programmer based in Munich, working sixteen to eighteen hours a day, traveling constantly, never having a girlfriend, with few serious prospects for getting married and having kids. Not that it mattered much to his brothers, but to his parents it mattered a great deal.

At least he felt guilty about it, David told himself. At least he had actually been home for the past few days, trying desperately to make up for lost time.

Yet he was palpably aware that he was not in control of events. Over the course of the past fifteen minutes or so, he had witnessed his mother slipping into a coma from which, the doctors explained, she would likely never recover. If that weren’t painful enough, it was becoming increasingly clear that he was simultaneously watching his father slip into a deep depression.

“Excuse me, Mr. Shirazi?”

David was startled by the voice of a nurse at the door.

“Me or my father?” he asked.

“Are you David?” asked the older woman running the late afternoon shift.

“I am.”

“You have a phone call at the nurses’ station.”

In all the sadness unfolding around him, David had completely forgotten that he’d turned his phone off when he had entered the hospital just before noon. Cell phones weren’t permitted in the ICU. He thanked the head nurse, patted his father on the back, and whispered that he would be right back. His father, sitting in a chair beside his wife, face buried in his hands, barely responded.