The Increment (15 page)

Esfahani could see Al-Majnoun’s head nodding in the viscous light. He was calculating sums on a mental tablet.

“And what next, Brother Interrogator?” asked Al-Majnoun eventually.

“We could use harsher techniques, of course. I have been waiting for your order. I am quite sure they would get us more information, but I cannot say that it would be reliable.”

“Not yet,” rasped Al-Majnoun. “There may be a time for that, but not now. Watch him, follow him, listen to what he says on the phone, in the dark, in his sleep. Look at his dreams. Play the music in his head.”

“Yes, General.”

Mehdi Esfahani had no idea what Al-Majnoun was saying. He waited patiently for more, but after five minutes it was evident that the Lebanese man had fallen asleep, or perhaps just stopped talking. Mehdi rose from his chair, bowed silently, and let himself out the door of the villa and into the light.

A driver from the
Etelaat-e Sepah brought Karim Molavi back to the white building in Jamaran. Dr. Bazargan and most of his colleagues were still there, but they shunned him when he returned. They knew he was under a shadow now. Karim was happy, if that is possible for a man who has spent the day being interrogated by the secret police. Whatever they were looking for, it was not the thing he was trying to hide. He went to the office of his friend Abbas, who had also taken his doctorate in physics.

“Shab bekheyr,”
said Karim, sticking his head in the door, trying to smile as he wished his friend a good evening. He asked if Abbas would like to join him for dinner. They could go get sushi at the Seryna restaurant in Vanak Square. Karim knew that his friend liked sushi, and the place was trendy. But Abbas said no, he was sorry. He had too much work to do. Okay, fine, no problem. But there was a look in his eye, as if Karim were carrying a disease.

Molavi went back to his own office and returned to the scientific papers he had been reading when Dr. Bazargan came by that morning. He would keep to his routine. That would be his protection. The picture of innocence. If they really had something solid on him, he would be in Evin Prison now, or someplace worse.

He closed his eyes and tried to think. He could hear people walking along the corridors outside his office, going home at last. One of the secretaries called out a singsong
“Khoda hafez!”
to wish one of her mates good night. They were still in the cocoon of ignorance, but he was not.

Their game was so obvious: They would watch him for a while, restricting his access to information day by day. They would wait for him to bolt. To contact someone, or make an unwise move. What did they have on him? How much did they know? That was the clever part. They didn’t tell you that. Perhaps the whole of the establishment—the employees of Tohid Electrical and the several dozen other companies in the secret network—came under periodic suspicion like this. Maybe that was the game, to shine a harsh light on everyone and see who flinched.

Molavi took a taxi
to the Vali Asr district. He wanted to be with other people. He went to the movies at the Farhang Theater and then stopped by a little coffee shop around the corner on Shariati Avenue and ordered a
Faludeh,
with extra rosewater and syrup. He wondered if they were following him. He struck up a conversation with a young man in an expensive leather jacket who was cradling a Nintendo Game Boy. All this young privileged man cared about were video games, it turned out. At home he had an Xbox and a PlayStation. He rattled off all the bootleg games he had managed to obtain, as if they were trophies of a better world. Karim tried to sound interested, just to have the company, but he wasn’t, and he eventually apologized that he was sleepy and paid his bill.

He went home to his flat in Yoosef Abad and tried to sleep, but when he closed his eyes, all he saw was light. He took his father’s yellowed volume of Ferdowsi’s epic poem, thinking the heavy words would lull him to sleep. The opening chapters told of Kayumars, the first king of the Persians.

You will not find another who has known

The might of Kayumars and his great throne

The world was his while he remained alive,

He showed men how to prosper and to thrive:

But all this world is like a tale we hear—

Men’s evil, and their glory, disappear.

Karim read the metered lines, wishing to be embraced by the timeless epic, but always his heart was racing. He was in mortal danger. If he stood still, they would eventually catch him. If he tried to escape, they would also catch him. If he spoke or was silent, either way, they would detect his crimes. Was there any path that was not an illusion? What would torture feel like? What would it be to…die? As dawn was breaking, in the half-dreaming state after a white night, he had a thought: He would communicate without communicating. He would send a message that was not a message. It would contain its own cover. He thought it would work. But was that the sleeplessness talking, the dream of escape?

Harry Pappas didn’t believe
in disloyalty of any kind. He couldn’t abide it in others and he had never, so far as he could remember, been guilty of it himself. But he returned from his latest trip to London with a feeling not so much of a breach as of having traded one loyalty for another. He couldn’t quite explain it to himself. He was a man who had never experienced ambivalence about things that mattered—not toward his wife, nor the agency; certainly not to his country. But he had that sense now. A part of him felt he was doing something wrong, but a much stronger voice said that his actions were correct and necessary. He was going to tell Andrea about it, but she was tired when he got home and he didn’t know how to begin. So he poured himself a deep glass of whiskey.

The first morning he was back he met with Marcia Hill and his young staff. The operational routine continued, with its reassuring checklist of tasks attempted and completed. A case officer in Yerevan had cold pitched an Iranian businessman who was living in Nekichevan; the man hadn’t said no, and the case officer thought he would say yes if they sweetened the deal by fifty thousand dollars. An Iranian scientist attending an IAEA meeting in Vienna had left his laptop computer in his room when he went to dinner. The hard drive had been copied, and the take from the computer was now being analyzed. The staff went through the rest of the in-box, and it all sounded serious—operations approved, agents vetted, source reports approved for dissemination. But who could say how much of it was real?

When the meeting broke up, Marcia Hill lingered in Harry’s office. She knew him in a way that none of the others did. She had covered for him when he ran off on his trip, but he hadn’t told even Marcia where he was going. For all she knew, he had been playing craps in Las Vegas, or banging a hooker in Boca Raton.

“So how are you?” she asked. It was a woman’s question. If a man had asked it, Harry would have barked that he was fine and that would be the end of it.

“Okay, I guess,” said Harry. “Why? Do I look tired?”

“Yes, but you always look tired. It’s more that you look distracted. Want to talk about it?”

She was smart, Marcia Hill. She had that instinct. That was what had made her a great spotter, in the old days. She could sense vulnerability in a man and home in on it.

“No,” said Harry. “Not now, maybe later. There’s a lot going on.”

“No shit, Harry. Those fuckers downtown are getting ready to bomb Tehran.” She took a woman’s special pleasure in swearing.

Harry shook his head. “They don’t get it. They don’t have a clue.”

She looked up at him, her boozy old eyes twinkling with the animation that age and hard living couldn’t destroy.

“Do
you
get it, Harry? We’re running out of time.”

“Yeah. I’m beginning to, a little. I’ll tell you about it when I can.”

Harry had been home
three days, trying without success to schedule an appointment with the director, when a new message from Iran arrived. This wasn’t left in the Gmail drop box, but in another direct message to the CIA’s overt website, sent via a server in Tabriz. At first the IOC didn’t realize it was Dr. Ali, but Harry knew as soon as he saw the message. Dr. Ali had gone back to his original mode of contact. That was the only communication he really trusted—the onetime code pad, using a computer he knew was secure. The new message was brief, and disturbing:

It is cold in Tehran this fall. I think we must leave for a vacation. Perhaps you can help me get the tickets. Leave a message for me in my box. The problem you are worried about will be okay.

The Iranian included with his message a jpeg digital picture. It showed a young woman in a head scarf cradling a smiling girl of perhaps three or four. The woman was an Iranian beauty, dark eyebrows over enormous eyes, and soft face sculpted in a perfect balance of light and dark, but there was a wary look in her eyes, as if she were imploring the photographer to stop what he was doing and get away. In the background were the wooded slopes of what the analysts decided must be Mellat Park, in North Tehran.

The first assumption was that the people in the picture must be his wife and daughter. Molavi must have come to the park with his family on a Friday afternoon, to eat sweets and walk in the gardens. That was what Harry imagined. The Iranian scientist didn’t want his family to know that anything was wrong, but he was showing his handlers what he had at stake, the beautiful woman and helpless child. He had taken them for a picnic in an anonymous park in the midst of Tehran—hiding for a day in a city where every street had a dark corner, where everyone was afraid, always—and he had taken a digital picture. And then he had sent the picture to underscore the message.
It is cold in Tehran this fall. I think we must leave for a vacation.

Something had happened. The Iranian was scared. Pappas knew it. He could feel the sweat on Molavi’s hand, as if he were greeting him at a safe house.

The Iranian had seen something at work, noticed surveillance on his way home, found a hidden program on his computer. Pappas had handled so many agents over the last twenty-five years that he could smell their fear, even in an email. They walked down the path of betrayal so confidently, thinking they knew what they were doing, and then one day they heard footsteps nearby, and they saw menacing shadows, and they knew. That’s where Dr. Ali was now: his hands were trembling, and his knees were buckling under him. He wanted out.

Pappas could see it in agonizing clarity, except for one thing. He still had no real idea who Karim Molavi was, beyond the name and address the British had obtained. He had decided he would keep those details to himself, for now. He knew too little, and thanks to Adrian, he knew too much.

Pappas gathered the members
of the SAP group later that day. Fox sent his deputy. He was already on to a different page.

“Our man is spooked,” Pappas told his colleagues. “I think he wants out.” People around the table groaned and shook their heads. They knew how valuable the Iranian was, even if Fox didn’t, and that it was critical that he remain in place. Now he was sending a cryptic message asking to defect? Nobody wanted to hear that now, when the clock was ticking and the president himself talked in the Situation Room about “our man in Tehran.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Fox’s deputy. He was worried that Harry would do something rash that might derail the policy train.

“Nothing,” said Harry. “Just tell him that we received his message and that we’ll get back to him soon.”

People around the table were relieved. At the modern-day CIA, doing nothing was usually the desirable course of action. If you did something, it was bound to make someone angry, and then they would start asking questions and demanding answers. But Harry meant something a little different. He would do nothing through CIA channels. He had entered a separate space. That was what Adrian had achieved. He had drawn Harry into another compartment.

Harry wanted to understand
the photograph. It was a clue, but what did it mean? He sent a copy of the jpeg to the Iranian-

American analyst in Persia House who had recognized the fragment of Ferdowsi’s poetry many weeks ago. Could she identify the woman using any of their databases? Could she find out more about when and where the photograph was taken?

The analyst was suspicious. She thought the photograph was too perfect, and wondered if she had seen it before. She did some research, and after twenty-four hours, she found an identical picture—of an Iranian movie actress and a child. It was a still photo from a new Iranian film, which had appeared in
Kayhan
newspaper a few months before. A little more research revealed that the woman in question was married to an Iranian movie director—so she could not be the wife of their Dr. Ali. It was a haunting photograph, in its way. But why had he chosen to send this false documentation?

Pappas asked the analyst for more information. What was in the background of the photograph? Was there any Farsi writing that might be a clue? Who was the movie director? What films had he made? The analysts sent Harry a list of the films made by the director. The most famous of them was called
Paper Airplanes
. It was about illusions, the analysts said. Was that part of Dr. Ali’s message? Did that explain his comment that “the problem you are worried about will be okay”? Was it part of his plea for help in escaping?

And then it occurred to Harry that there was a simpler explanation. Dr. Ali had sent a false picture because a true one would have given him away. He had sent a picture of someone famous, whom the Iranians could identify if they tracked the message. They would ask all their questions about the director and his wife. When they realized that the movie director was blameless, they would assume that the sender of the message must have a wife and child, too—that this was part of the communication. But it was a veil, over a mask, over a lie.

“I say we leave
him in,” said Fox. “A few more months, while all this plays out. He can still do us some good, if he’s in. Once he’s out, he’s worthless.” He looked toward Harry and stuck his chin out, as if to show that he was in command of the situation.

They were sitting in the director’s office, on the couch by the window. The director was fiddling with a set of pearl-inlaid dice he had received on a recent trip to Oman, from the chief of the intelligence service there. He kept shaking them in his hand, but he didn’t let them roll. The rattle and click of the dice was the only sound in the room.

“What do you think, Harry?” asked the director, setting down the dice. They showed double sixes. Boxcars.

“He’s our agent,” said Pappas. “He’s frightened, and he’s asking for help. He trusts us. If we screw him and he gets caught, it may be years before anyone else takes the plunge. Plus, we need to talk with him. We can’t understand what his intel means without a real debrief.”

“Could we get him out, assuming that we decided we want to?”

“Maybe,” answered Harry. “We have an exfiltration plan for Tehran, same as for everywhere. But it’s complicated because we don’t have a station there.” He debated whether to tell the director and Fox about what Winkler had said about the special British capability. “The Increment.” But that wasn’t his secret to share, so he fudged it.

“We might be able to get some people in on the ground, with help from other services. They could help us get our man out, or at least to somewhere we can debrief him. It would take a little time to organize, but I think it’s the best bet. The worst would be to go public with the information our source has provided so far. That’s sure to get him killed.”

“Don’t be sentimental,” said Fox. “I think we should stop worrying and leave him in place. More to the point, so does the White House. I asked, when the message first came in. That’s what they think. I quote: ‘We can’t sacrifice U.S. national security for the sake of one person.’ Sorry. That’s what they think. Direct from Appleman.”

Harry looked at Fox, smugly asserting his White House connections, and then at the director, who was fumbling with the dice again. Harry didn’t want to take a suicide dive. But he knew that if he didn’t speak up now, it would be too late.

“Stewart Appleman isn’t running this case, Arthur. I am. And as long as it’s mine, I am going to protect my asset in every way I can. We don’t know anything new about the Iranian bomb program except what he has told you. You wouldn’t know that they had tested a neutron generator unless this man had risked his life to tell you. You don’t know if they can get it to work, or whether they’re five months away from a test, or five years, or never. You won’t know
anything
until we have more information.”

Harry turned to the director. “That’s what I think. If you disagree, you better find someone else to run the Iran Operations Division.”

“Are you threatening me?” sneered Fox. “That’s outrageous.”

The director didn’t like conflict. He wanted to make everyone happy. He was nervous about Fox and his political patrons, but he was also wary of Harry and the permanent bureaucracy of the clandestine service, where Harry was a beloved senior officer.

“Take a deep breath, everyone, for God’s sake,” said the director. “We don’t need this. Let’s remember who the enemy is.”

He looked at Pappas. He wished he was back in the navy, where he could just give an order and know that everyone would salute.

“I don’t want you to quit, Harry. God knows. But I can tell you that Arthur is accurate in describing the mood at the White House. They are ready to roll, even if we are not. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to give Harry a little more time, to see what he can do about his man in Tehran. But not so much time that the president will think we are stalling. Because we’re not.”

Harry looked at his boss. This was the best he was going to get.

“Okay,” he said.

“Suck it up, Harry,” said Fox. “Instead of pulling your boy out of the hot seat, why don’t you figure out a way to squeeze him? If this guy is as wonderful a source as you say, then why can’t you find him? And why can’t you figure out a way to use him? Why can’t you get more information that would actually help us understand what’s going on? Otherwise you’re wasting everybody’s time.”

“Fuck you,” Harry muttered under his breath. He wanted to say a great deal more, but he checked himself. He needed to be careful now. He had to start covering his tracks, and create space where he could operate. These people weren’t listening to him. He had been down this road once before and he knew where it ended up.

Harry opened the “iranmetalworks”
Gmail account late that afternoon. He wrote a message and saved it. The message said: