The Tehran Initiative (8 page)

There was no time, of course, to ponder any of this, certainly not on the roof of Upstate University Hospital. But the notion of going back to his mother’s room, pulling his father aside, and telling him there was an “emergency at work” and that he needed to leave town immediately made him physically ill. What fictional emergency could he possibly concoct in the next two minutes that would persuade his father he really had to leave at a time like this?

David knew he was stalling, but he wasn’t sure what to do next. He stared down at his phone and was tempted to call Marseille, just for a moment, just to make sure she had gotten back to Portland okay. If she seemed eager—or even simply willing—to talk a little longer, well, that would be good too. And maybe a sign. At least she would know how he felt right now. She would know what to say to him. After all, she hadn’t lost only one parent; she’d lost two.

David thought better of it and abruptly put the phone away. This was not the time or the place. He had to stay focused. He glanced at his watch and winced. He needed to be at Hancock Field in less than an hour, and he still needed to get back to his parents’ house to pack.

He headed back downstairs. As he approached his mother’s room, he could see his father sitting in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth in an almost-hypnotic rhythm. He wasn’t crying anymore. He was just sitting there, staring at his beloved wife, who lay in her bed motionless and hooked up to all kinds of life-support systems. The entire scene was hard to bear, but it was the vacant look in his father’s eyes that pained David most of all.

His parents had been married for more than three decades, and they were inseparable. It seemed like nearly every kid David had grown up with had divorced parents. But throughout all of his own trials and mistakes and disappointments growing up, one thing he had always been able to count on was the deep and abiding love of his parents. Mohammad Shirazi had been born in 1952, just a year before Nasreen Vali, in adjacent towns. They had both grown up in Iran under the Shah. Theirs had been an arranged marriage, but their parents loved them and had chosen carefully and wisely. Mohammad and Nasreen had spoken their vows in the early seventies and escaped from Iran together during the Islamic Revolution of 1979, losing all of their material possessions, including a thriving medical practice, in the process. When they’d arrived in the US, they’d had to rebuild their lives from scratch, but they had done so without complaining. Mohammad had studied hard to get his American license to practice cardiology. The couple had made friends, bought a home, raised three sons, put them all through college, and lived the American dream without a handout from anyone. They were proud of that. They had done it themselves. They had done it together. They were more in love today, David was certain, than ever before, and it was clear his father couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.

Would she be lost forever? Would they ever see her again? None of them had ever taken religion seriously. Though born Shia Muslims, David’s parents had always prided themselves on their rejection of Islam. Now his mother was about to find out the truth about heaven and hell. David suddenly felt cold and scared in a way he’d never felt before. He was staring into the abyss, without a single answer, without a single shred of hope.

Abruptly he realized his decision had become clear. He could no longer lie to his father. Whatever the consequences, David was going to tell him the truth. Not all of it. He would not betray state secrets or operational security. But his father had to know that his son worked for the Agency. He had to know David was fighting against the great evil that had driven them from their beloved land of Persia in the first place, the very evil that had cost them so dearly before and might very well cost them even more. He had to know why his son was leaving tonight. David wasn’t sure his father would believe him, but he needed to try.

“Hey, Dad,” he whispered, poking his head in the door, “can I talk to you about something?”

* * *

Tehran, Iran

Tehran was eight and a half hours ahead of central New York.

Hamid Hosseini, Iran’s Supreme Leader and Grand Ayatollah, finished his early-morning prayers. He had been caught off guard by Javad Nouri’s predawn call informing him of the Twelfth Imam’s sudden and unexpected decision to visit Beirut rather than return directly to Iran. But who was he to question the Lord of the Age?

Hosseini asked Allah to bless every detail of the Mahdi’s trip, to give him safety and success, and to give him the infinite wisdom needed to build the Caliphate longed for by a billion Muslims. Then he rose to his feet, left the small mosque in the palace without saying a word, made the short walk with his bodyguards back to his enormous corner office, and shut the door behind him. He planned to stay in seclusion for the next several hours.

Pulling out an unmarked folder, he began reviewing the latest assessment from his chief of intelligence. The good news was that Iranian scientists had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle and now had a small but significant stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU) ranging from 95 to 98 percent purity. As a result of such efforts, design teams had finally completed building nine nuclear warheads and had tested one just two weeks previously.

Hosseini was not a physicist, and he skimmed over much of the technical detail contained in the report. But the bottom line was clear enough. The warhead had worked perfectly. The blast yield had been extraordinary. The design they had bought years before from A. Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, had been a good investment after all. They weren’t ready to attach any of the warheads to the high-speed ballistic missiles they had built themselves or bought from the North Koreans. Indeed, the report indicated the team still felt they were many months away from perfecting a missile delivery system. But that was okay. For now, Hosseini concluded, he had what he needed. What’s more, the report promised him that within roughly another three weeks, six more warheads would be built and ready for use.

Not all the news was good, however.

For starters, Dr. Mohammed Saddaji, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, was dead, killed by a car bomb in Hamadan just days before. Saddaji’s death was a huge blow to the weapons program. The pioneer of Iran’s clandestine Bomb-making program, Saddaji was nearly irreplaceable. It was still unclear to Hosseini how Saddaji’s activities had been discovered by whoever had assassinated him. He had held the fairly innocuous title of deputy director of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran and had ostensibly been in charge of day-to-day operations at the Bushehr reactor, the nuclear power plant located near the Persian Gulf that was about to go online that spring after years of delays and technical complications.

Most of Hosseini’s closest advisors were convinced that the Israelis were responsible for Saddaji’s death. The charge made for good propaganda, and the Supreme Leader encouraged them to feed those rumors to the blogosphere and the Western media. But Hosseini had a source he trusted who told him it was the Egyptians who had murdered Saddaji. What’s more, the source indicated that the order for the hit had come directly from President Abdel Ramzy. Was it true? He had no idea. How could Ramzy have found out? It did not matter. All that mattered to Hosseini was retribution, and now he had taken it.

But there was more bad news. Saddaji’s death, the nuclear test beneath Alvand Mountain, near Hamadan, and the subsequent earthquake in the area had drawn unwanted attention. Now Hosseini’s intelligence chief believed that Facility 278, Iran’s top-secret nuclear weapons development complex, located forty kilometers west of Hamadan and built into the side of the 11,000-foot mountain, had been compromised. The site was surely being watched twenty-four hours a day by spy satellites from nearly every country possessing such technology, and most definitely the Americans and the Zionists. This was a huge problem, the report in Hosseini’s hands noted, because most of the warheads were still being housed there—not all, but most. They needed to be moved fast and without international detection. They needed to be moved into position to be used, in accordance with the Mahdi’s explicit instructions. But how?

* * *

Syracuse, New York

The stunned look on his father’s face pained David.

He hadn’t wanted to hurt his father or add to his many burdens. He hoped he had done the right thing. But as the two men sat together in silence, David’s anxieties began to grow. Was it anger he detected in his father? Disappointment? Resentment? The man was hard to read.

One thing was clear: Dr. Shirazi clearly believed his son’s story, even if David had left out a few key elements. David hadn’t shared with his father the fact that Jack Zalinsky had been the one to recruit him to join the CIA, nor that Zalinsky had been responsible for his training. He hadn’t revealed any of the operational details of his life in the CIA, like the fact that his apartment in Munich was just a front or that the name most people knew him by these days was Reza Tabrizi.

“So how long have you been in the CIA?” Dr. Shirazi asked.

“A few years,” David said. “I’m not allowed to say exactly.”

“And you think Iran is behind the attack in New York today?”

“I don’t have proof, Dad, but yes, that’s where I think the trail of evidence will eventually lead.”

“So you’re going back into Iran tonight?”

“Well, no, not exactly. I’m flying to DC tonight to meet my colleagues at Langley and compare notes and develop a plan. And then we’ll see.”

“But they’re probably going to send you back into Iran?”

David nodded, his stomach in knots, and there was another long, uncomfortable pause.

“Dad, I’m not even sure I should stay with the Agency.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m thinking of stepping down.”

“Why?”

“I want to be with you and Mom. I want to help you, not leave you all alone. And honestly, I’m not sure whether I really—”

But his father cut him off. “No, no, David; you have to go. You have to. Your country needs you, especially now.”

“But, Dad, there are others who—”

But Dr. Shirazi would have none of it. “I’m so proud of you, David.”

“You are?”

“Of course. Your mother would be too.”

David bit his lip. This wasn’t a reaction he’d even considered.

“Honestly, I wish I was young enough to do the same thing.” Dr. Shirazi smiled faintly and put his arm on David’s shoulder.

“Join the CIA?”

“Of course.”

“But why?”

“Because America saved my life, and your mother’s. The CIA and the State Department saved our lives. I’ll never forget what Jack Zalinsky and Charlie Harper did. They risked their lives to get us out of Iran. They adopted us into this country. Don’t get me wrong, Son; I love Iran for giving me birth, but I’m disgusted by what the mullahs are doing to the people. I loathe Ayatollah Hosseini and President Darazi. I despise everything they stand for. They’re suffocating Iran’s economy. They’re devouring Iran’s children. They’re strangling Iran’s future, and they don’t care. They’re cult members and murderers, both of them. They deny the Holocaust, and they want to murder six million Israeli Jews. And that’s not even their main goal. Israel is just the small devil. America is the big devil. Hosseini and Darazi want to annihilate us all. They want to murder Christians along with Jews, plus every Muslim who doesn’t believe what they believe. They want the whole world to bow down and worship the Twelfth Imam, all to bring about their Caliphate and the end of the world. They are evil, David, sheer evil. Someone has to stop them. Someone has to go in there and cut through all their lies and all their defenses and find a way to put an end to all this madness. And believe me, David, if I were younger, I would join the CIA and go back to Iran and put a bullet through both their heads. I thought about that many times over the years, but I’m ashamed to say I never had the guts to do it. But I will die a happy man—your mother will die a happy woman—if that someone is you. At least our lives will have meant something. At least we’ll have done something right.”

9

Tehran, Iran

Hosseini set down the folder and turned on the television.

He soon found himself glued to Iran’s state-run news channel, showing alternating coverage of the Twelfth Imam’s inaugural address in Mecca only four days before and the news out of Manhattan. As he stared at the mesmerizing images and listened to the reporting and analysis, Hosseini found himself in near disbelief. For decades he had prayed for this moment—dreamed of it, studied for it, prepared for it. But though he didn’t dare confide this to any of his subjects or staff, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran wasn’t sure if he had ever fully believed such a moment would truly happen in his lifetime, much less that he would be so intimately involved. It was one thing to believe oneself to be living in the end of days, but it was quite another to be certain.

As a child, his parents and teachers had taught him that one day, Muhammad Ibn Hasan Ibn Ali—aka the Promised One, the Mahdi, the Lord of the Age, the Twelfth Imam—would return from hiding or “occultation,” bring Jesus as his deputy, force all Jews and Christians and other infidels to convert or perish, destroy the leaders of enemy nations, and then reestablish the Islamic Caliphate once and for all. Seven decades later, he could still remember word for word a passage from one of his grandfather’s books on Shia eschatology that his father had required him to memorize. The words were seared into his psyche forever, and as he watched a montage of video clips, they began to tumble involuntarily from his lips.

“‘He will appear as a handsome young man, clad in neat clothes and exuding the fragrance of paradise. His face will glow with love and kindness for the human beings. He has a radiant forehead, piercing black eyes, and a broad chest. He very much resembles his ancestor, the prophet Muhammad. Heavenly light and justice accompany him. He will overcome enemies and oppressors with the help of God, and as per the promise of the Almighty, the Mahdi will eradicate all corruption and injustice from the face of the earth and establish the global government of peace, justice, and equity.’”