On the way to the car rentals, David tried to call Mina.
With so much of the network in the region down, however, getting a signal proved impossible. So he called from a pay phone and finally tracked her down. Mina provided him with directions on where to find Esfahani but apologized that she still hadn’t found him a functioning hotel. She asked him to be patient and promised to have something in the next few hours.
“No problem,” David said, figuring he could always fly right back to Tehran if she couldn’t find him any accommodations. “But I have a question to ask you.”
“What is it?”
“I’m just wondering, would it be appropriate if I called Mr. Rashidi and offered my condolences for the death of his brother-in-law?”
“Of course,” Mina said. “I think that would be very kind. Let me get you that number.”
As he waited, David asked if Mr. Rashidi’s brother-in-law was elderly or ill.
“Neither,” Mina said.
“He wasn’t killed in an accident, was he?”
“Not exactly,” Mina answered.
“Then how?”
“He was killed in a car bombing.”
“What?” David asked, not believing he had just heard her correctly. “In Hamadan? When?”
“Just a few days ago,” Mina said. “And the odd thing is that you’d think something like that would make the news. But it didn’t.”
That was strange, David thought. If his mobile phone service had been working, he’d have immediately done a search for the story on the Internet. Instead he asked for the man’s name.
“You mean Mr. Rashidi’s brother-in-law?”
“Yes, who was he?”
“His name was Mohammed,” Mina said. “Mohammed Saddaji.”
David was stunned, though he tried not to let his voice betray that fact. “You mean Dr. Mohammed Saddaji? the deputy director of Iran’s nuclear agency?”
“Yes. He was a brilliant scientist, and he and Mr. Rashidi were close. It’s very sad.”
“It certainly is. Why was Dr. Saddaji visiting Hamadan?”
“He wasn’t visiting,” Mina said innocently. “He lived there.”
David had many more questions, but he didn’t want to risk arousing suspicion. So he thanked Mina and promised to check back with her in a few hours about the hotel. Then he hung up the phone and proceeded to pick up his rental car while trying to process this new piece of information. There were no Iranian nuclear facilities in Hamadan—none that he had been briefed about, anyway. So why did such a high-ranking official in the Iranian nuclear program live there? Was Mina mistaken? Or was it possible there was a major facility in the area of which U.S. intelligence was unaware?
David found his car, pulled out of the airport grounds, and began driving south on Route 5 toward the city center. For the first ten minutes or so, he saw no serious signs of damage, confirming the news reports, which indicated the most severe impact had occurred downtown and to the west. He soon passed Payam Noor University on his right, then came through a roundabout onto the main beltway around the city, named after Ayatollah Khomeini. When he approached the neighborhood of the Besat Medical Center on the city’s south side, he began to see the full effects of the devastation.
Ambulances passed every few moments with flashing lights and sirens. Army helicopters were landing on the hospital’s roof, bringing in more casualties. All around, David could see single-family homes split in two and high-rise apartments lying toppled on their sides or crumpled into heaps of smoldering ruins.
He turned on the radio, and the news got worse. The confirmed death toll now topped 35,000 dead, with more than 110,000 wounded. Jumbo jets from the Red Crescent would be arriving soon, one reporter said, bringing tens of thousands of blankets and tents, along with desperately needed water and food. But movement on severely damaged roads was slow, the reporter explained, and rescue efforts were being hampered by the lack of reliable communications.
“It’s not just that the cell towers are down,” the newscaster reported. “Technicians from Iran Telecom are scrambling to restore wireless service, in particular, to help emergency crews of first responders rescue the wounded and care for the suffering. But thousands of landlines are down, fiber-optic lines have been severed, and even regular two-way radio service is being hampered by levels of static and blackout zones for which officials say they have no immediate explanation.”
David turned down a one-way street, then another, and then a third. He looped around in a school parking lot, then zigzagged through another residential neighborhood, trying to determine if anyone was following him. Satisfied that he was not being tailed, he pulled over to the side of the road and fired up his laptop. He opened the file with all of Esfahani’s contacts and searched for Dr. Mohammed Saddaji.
The search came up blank. Saddaji’s information wasn’t there.
Still, he knew he had to get that information back to Zalinsky as fast as possible. This wasn’t Baghdad or Mosul or Kabul. Car bombings didn’t happen every day in Iran. Certainly not in Hamadan. The Israelis were here, David concluded. They had to be. Which meant they knew more about what was going on with Iran’s nuclear program than Langley did. They wouldn’t have taken out Saddaji unless they had reason to believe that he was at the heart of Iran’s weaponization effort and that the weaponization effort was about to bear fruit.
David checked his phone. The good news was that he now had some coverage. The bad news was that he had only one bar. That was too much of a risk. He couldn’t take the chance and make an international call when so many cell towers were down. Even if he got through, a call to Dubai would likely get noticed by Iranian intelligence since call volume in the area had to be so low at the moment. Then again, David figured, he did have five secure satellite phones on the seat beside him.
He opened one, called Zalinsky, and coded in as Zephyr.
The conversation didn’t go as David hoped.
“Your memo was inappropriate,” Zalinsky began.
“Why?”
“Because your job is to gather and send us actionable information about the Iranian government, not political analysis about our own. Also because I told you not to get sidetracked by all this Shia End Times stuff. That’s not the story. The weapons are the story. And even if all the analysis in your memo was right—and I highly doubt that it is, but even if it was—you provided no hard facts to back up all those dubious assertions. It’s an op-ed piece for the Post, and not a particularly good one at that.”
David gritted his teeth but didn’t back down. He insisted he was sending back every scrap of intel he could. But he was equally adamant that he would be derelict in his duty not to report his impressions of the religious and political dynamic he was seeing inside Iran, and his sense that the U.S. was not doing nearly enough to stop the Iranians in time. Only having got all that off his chest did he tell Zalinsky that the deputy director of Iran’s nuclear program had recently been killed by a car bomb, and that he suspected the Israelis were doing what the U.S. wasn’t—fighting fire with fire.
Zalinsky was stunned that Saddaji was dead. Stunned, too, that Saddaji had been living for several years in Hamadan. He hadn’t known that. No one in the Agency had. And David was probably right: it had to have been the Israelis who had taken Saddaji out. It certainly hadn’t been anyone from Langley.
“The Mossad is treating this like a real war,” David argued.
“We are too,” Zalinsky said.
“No, we’re not,” David pushed back. “The Israelis have been sabotaging Iranian facilities and kidnapping or assassinating key scientists and military officials for the last several years. What have we been doing? begging Hosseini and Darazi to sit down and negotiate with us? threatening ‘crippling’ economic consequences but imposing lame, toothless sanctions instead? No wonder the Israelis are losing confidence in us. I’m losing confidence in us.”
“That’s enough,” Zalinsky said. “You just do your job and
let me do mine.”
“I’m doing my job, but it’s not enough,” David replied, trying to control himself but growing more frustrated and angry by the minute. “I’m sending you everything I have, but where is it getting us? Nowhere.”
“You have to be patient,” Zalinsky counseled.
“Why?”
“These things take time.”
“We don’t have any more time,” David insisted. “The Israelis just ran the largest war game in their history. They just took out the highest-ranking nuclear scientist in the country. Prime Minister Naphtali is warning President Jackson and the world that if we don’t act, Israel will. What are we doing? Seriously, what are we really doing to stop Iran from getting the Bomb? Because from my perspective on the ground, sir, things are spinning out of control.”
“Believe me, I understand,” Zalinsky said, “but we have to build our case with facts, not guesses, not speculation, not hearsay. We blew it in Iraq. I told you that. Not completely, but when it came to weapons of mass destruction, we didn’t have the facts—not enough of them, anyway. We didn’t have the ‘slam dunk’ case we said we did. So we’d sure better have one this time. We need to be able to carefully document the answers to every question the president or his advisors ask us. The stakes are too high for anything less. So give me a target. Give me something actionable, and we’ll take action.”
“What kind of action?” David asked. “You think the president is going to order someone assassinated? You think we’re really going to blow up some facility? We already know of a dozen or more nuclear facilities here. Have we hit one yet?”
“First of all, that’s not your call,” Zalinsky said. “Your job is to get us information we don’t have. What happens next is my job. But don’t forget the president’s executive order. We are authorized to use ‘all means necessary’ to stop or slow down Iran’s nuclear weapons program. When the time is right, we’ll do just that. But we can’t afford any screwups. You got that?”
David wanted to believe Zalinsky. But he secretly admired the courage the Israelis had to defend the Jewish people from another Holocaust, and he worried his own government had either lost its nerve or become resigned to the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Shifting gears, David asked if Zalinsky and Fischer had gotten anything useful out of Rashidi’s or Esfahani’s phone calls. Unfortunately, the answer was no.
“We learned that Rashidi’s brother-in-law had died tragically,” Zalinsky replied. “We learned his name was Mohammed and that the funeral was going to be in Hamadan. None of the calls ever mentioned a car bomb or his last name. So this is good work, son. I’ll get the rest of the team right on this, verifying all this. But this is exactly what I want you to be doing—giving me information I can use. I’m not saying you can’t have your own opinion. But I’m not asking you for your analysis. I’ve got twenty guys doing analysis. What we need are facts no one else in the world has. Stuff like this. Just get me more.”
David promised he would. He coded out, hung up the phone, and cleared the satellite phone’s memory of any trace of the call. But his frustration was growing. It was one thing for the White House not to get what was truly happening on the ground inside Iran. But David feared his mentor might not fully get it either.
72
David pulled into an Iran Telecom switching station on the edge of the city.
The facility itself and the equipment inside had been heavily damaged by the earthquake, and the parking lot was filled with the trucks of Iran Telecom staff and contractors who had come to get the place back in working condition.
David found Esfahani on the second floor, wearing a hard hat and assessing the extent of the damage with a group of repairmen. He caught the executive’s eye and held up his right hand, indicating he had the five remaining satellite phones with him. Esfahani excused himself from his colleagues and took David aside.
“Where are they?” Esfahani asked.
“They’re in my trunk.”
“How quickly can you get all the rest of them here?”
“All 313?”
“Exactly.”
“I really don’t know if that’s possible.”
“Look, Reza, we don’t have a lot of time,” Esfahani said. “Things are moving very rapidly now. I will go to the Chinese if I have to, but I want to work with you, so long as you understand we have to move fast.”
“I completely understand,” David said. “I know you’re under a huge time constraint. I’m just saying we have to be careful. Do you know how hard it was to get these twenty without drawing suspicion from within my company, much less from all the international intelligence agencies who are watching everything that comes in and out of this country like hawks?”
“The Chinese couldn’t care less about international intelligence agencies,” Esfahani said.
“But you have to,” David said, taking a risk. “Look, these phones aren’t for just anyone. They’re for the Lord of the Age, correct? Shouldn’t he have the very best?”
“Of course.”
“Then I’ll be blunt. The Chinese phones stink. I mean, they’ll do if you’re a business guy trying to sell steel or cars or toys or whatever. But you told me you needed state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“Then you need me, not the Chinese,” David assured him. “We just have to make sure we do it the right way so you don’t invite scrutiny that you don’t need and I don’t get caught by my company. We have to do it in a way that provides Imam al-Mahdi and his team with exactly what they need so they can talk without Beijing or the Russians or, Allah forbid, the Americans or the Zionists listening in.”
“You’re right,” Esfahani said. “We need to be careful.”
“You’re trying to help the Mahdi—peace be upon him—build an army,” David continued. “I want to help you. I want to be part of changing history. Just tell me what I need to do, and I’ll get you whatever you need. You have my word.”
“I appreciate that. Now let me see what you brought me,” Esfahani said.
David took him to the car, opened the trunk, and gave him the five boxes.
Esfahani opened one and smiled. “These are nice.”
“Best in the world.”
“My people back in Tehran scrubbed the ones you gave them this morning,” Esfahani said, leafing through one of the instruction manuals. “They said they’re all clean.”
“They are. I checked them all myself before I brought them from Munich. This is the very same phone the chancellor of Germany uses, and the president of France, and the prime minister of Italy, and all of their top staff. And believe me, the Europeans don’t want the Americans or Israelis intercepting their calls either.”
“You’ve done well, Reza. I am very grateful.”
“It’s an honor to help my country,” David said. “I want only the best for my people.”
“I believe that’s true,” Esfahani said, taking the five boxes to his own car and locking them in the trunk. “Which is why I want to tell you something.”
Then Esfahani quietly explained what the Group of 313 was and why he and Rashidi were searching for devout Shia Muslims who possessed strong administrative and technical skills and would be completely loyal to the Mahdi.
“We are recruiting an army of ten thousand mujahideen ready to give their lives to annihilate Tel Aviv, Washington, New York, and Los Angeles and usher in the reign of the Promised One.”
David didn’t dare say anything that might get Esfahani suspicious. “How can I join?” he asked after a few moments.
“No one joins,” Esfahani said. “You must be chosen.”
“But you could recommend me.”
“We are considering you. Mr. Rashidi will decide. But if you can deliver all these phones quickly, I think you will win his confidence and his recommendation.”
David couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and he wondered what Zalinsky would say.
“I will do my best to earn that honor.”
“I know you will. In the meantime, I want you to learn from a master. He is one of our greatest scholars and he lives close to here. You will spend the evening there; there are no hotels available anyway. Tomorrow, I expect you to start working on the rest of the phones we require. But for tonight, you will sit at a master’s feet and learn about our beloved Imam.”
“Who is he?”
“He is a great teacher. He also happens to be related to Daryush.”
David immediately knew whom he meant, but he said nothing.
“Have you ever heard of Dr. Alireza Birjandi?” Esfahani asked.
“Of course,” David said. “I recently read one of his books. But isn’t he living in seclusion?”
“I think he would like to meet you. He is a professor at heart, and he loves bright, young, eager minds.”
“I couldn’t impose on him.”
“It is all arranged. You should bring the man some food. It is never acceptable to visit empty-handed.”
“That is very gracious,” David said. “May Allah bless you and your family. May I ask one more question before I leave?”
“Of course,” Esfahani said. “What is it?”
“Did Imam al-Mahdi actually reveal himself here in Hamadan?”
“Yes, he did,” Esfahani said. “It was astounding!”
“Did he really heal a woman who had her legs crushed in the earthquake?”
“Yes, he did. Everyone has been talking about it.”
“But how do you know it’s really true?” David asked. “I’m always a little skeptical about what I hear on the news.”
“You are a very wise and thoughtful young man,” Esfahani answered. “But I didn’t hear it on the news.”
“How then?”
“I was there.”
73
An hour later, David arrived at Alireza Birjandi’s house.
It was a modest, single-story, two-bedroom home that might be called a bungalow back in the States. Built of concrete and wood on the outskirts of the city, it appeared to David as if it dated back to the 1940s or 50s and hadn’t seen many updates since.