The Increment (29 page)

The helicopter trip from
Ashgabat took just over an hour. The craft followed the main highway east and then banked south over ragged farmland ruined by decades of Soviet monocrop agriculture. Adrian and Harry had come along, each for a different reason wanting to be waiting at the other side of the border when the team came out. Both men sat in harness in the chopper, wraparound sunglasses shielding their eyes from the sun and wind. Nobody said much on the trip. Their focus was inward. Karim was dressed in dirty coveralls that cloaked the black suit he would wear to the laboratory. Jackie, Hakim, and Marwan were dressed in the modest pilgrim garb they would wear into Mashad. Weapons and other gear were packed into two bags.

The Mitsubishi minivan was waiting in a garage on the Turkmenistan side of Saraghs. The driver stood beside the van wearing a round Turkmen hat that stood atop his head like a brightly colored porkpie. He had a wispy beard and high cheekbones—a Mongol face of the steppes. He had been paid some money already by Atwan’s man, enough so that he was attentive as a house dog. Hakim and Marwan approached him, miming the splayed feet and bad backs of men who had lived in the sun. Jackie followed submissively behind them, shrouded in black. All three had a protean ability to change shape and deportment. They could become whatever they had to be.

The driver spoke a little Arabic. Hakim spoke a little Turkish and Marwan a little Farsi, so they managed to say enough that they understood each other. Karim Molavi, the special cargo, was the last to arrive. He had been talking outside with Harry, having a few last words before the journey. He was dressed in a floppy cotton hat and his rough coveralls. The driver hadn’t been given any explanation for who this mystery passenger was, and he didn’t ask. Dressed as he was, Karim might have been a foreign worker smuggling himself to the West to look for work.

The driver raised the backseat, revealing the compartment where Karim would ride during the three-hour trip. He handed him a large bottle of mineral water and gave him a rough pat on the back, and then sent him into the well. Karim hunched into a fetal position. He was big enough that it was a tight fit in the narrow van, but he eventually arranged his limbs in the least uncomfortable position, and the driver lowered the seat on top of him.

The driver checked the documents of his other three travelers. He scanned the photos and stamps, and checked the visa page twice. He nodded and gave a half wink, as if to say, Good work, and smiled a nearly toothless grin. The most reassuring thing about him was that he was so obviously corrupt, and the certainty that Atwan paid better than anyone else.

The Mitsubishi rumbled through
the Turkmen sector of Saraghs toward the border that bisected this ancient Silk Road town. They were nearly an hour at the frontier. The Turkmen side was easy enough; those skids had been thoroughly greased. When they had passed over to the Iranian side, the driver led his three visible passengers into the passport control office, where they stood in line with several dozen other travelers, all smelling of tobacco and the road. It wasn’t Ramadan or Moharram, so the number of pilgrims was fewer than it might have been, which only meant the border police could work even slower. The driver handed over their passports and explained in his broken Farsi that they were pilgrims—a Lucknow Shiite from Pakistan and his bride, and a Shiite from the Zaydi sect in Yemen. The Iranian passport man barely looked at them. The two men looked dumb and dirty, and the woman didn’t exist. The rubber stamp came down and they were through.

The driver moved on to the customs check. He gave the customs man his registration document with the usual ten dollars folded inside, but another man was working the post as well today, and he wanted his cut. So after some grumbling, the driver procured more money from his valise, and eventually they were on the road again.

They crossed the border into Iran proper just before 10:00 a.m. The highway rolled south through a gritty urban landscape and then into patchwork farmland. But you could see in an instant that Iran was a real country, with road signs and police and even a little airport on the Iranian side of Saraghs for the twice-weekly flight to Tehran. Gradually the highway rose from the desert floor to the uplands of Gonbari and Mozdurem. Passenger cars zipped past the wheezing Mitsubishi. Iranians were in a hurry to get where they were going, even at this eastern edge of the country. There was a high hum from the middle seat. Jackie was singing to herself and, she imagined, to Karim bundled underneath.

Mashad was an urban
sprawl in the eastern desert. It was bigger than visitors expected, and more modern, with several generations of ring roads encircling the old city and the Holy Shrine of Imam Reza. The city’s growth had been a perverse consequence of Iran’s modern history; its population had nearly doubled during the Iraq-Iran war because it was the farthest city from the war zone, and it had never shrunk back to its old size. It was noisy and sulfurous, a jumble of people and traffic. That disorder was another bit of cover for the group in the Mitsubishi.

They took the eastern
bypass and headed north until they reached a clover-leaf interchange called Ghaem Square. The driver had a rest stop near there; a petrol station run by Turkmen immigrants where he habitually pulled in for fuel and repairs. He steered the minivan into the garage and closed the door so that the vehicle was hidden from view. Hakim and his putative wife climbed out of the middle seat. The Turkmen driver opened the rear-seat bench and pulled a very sore Karim from his iron box. The Iranian’s legs were so cramped that he wobbled at first, barely able to stand.

The driver left them alone to make their last preparations. It was now just past one. Karim planned to meet his friend Reza in an hour. The team would collect him two hours after that, at four.

Jackie handed Karim the super-taser that would burn out the synapses and memory links of the processor in the neutron laboratory at Ardebil. She had kept it under the billowing black folds of her chador. She went over the plan one more time: he must enter the facility with the device, be present when his friend was logging on to the system, and remain there with him for an hour, if possible. He should lay down his jacket so that the device physically touched the computer processor in the laboratory.

Marwan would be outside the facility, driving the chip-burning taser with a battery-powered unit that was now hidden in a dirty canvas bag hoisted over his shoulders. Hakim and Jackie would check in as husband and wife at a pilgrim hotel that would be their escape place. She handed Karim the address. The Tus Hotel on Shirazi Street. After they got the room, she and Hakim would return with the driver in the Mitsubishi van and wait at a park just south of the ring road, near Ardebil Research Establishment, until Karim emerged around four.

“Bring your friend Reza out with you,” said Jackie. “Ask him to have dinner. That will make him think everything is normal.”

“Okay, sure,” said Karim. It sounded like an order. “What will you do?”

She was always smiling with confidence, but for just an instant she had an odd look on her face.

“We’ll disappear. When dinner is over, we’ll meet and get on our way.”

The young Iranian nodded. This was not his world. He was playing this role because Harry the American had asked him to, and had invoked the sacred memory of his father. The pebble he had dropped into the pond had created a wave that was now far larger than he was. He took off his coveralls and handed them to Hakim. His black suit was a bit rumpled, but clean. He combed his hair carefully in a mirror Jackie held up for him. He wished that he was wearing his father’s gold cuff links, for luck.

Karim Molavi was an
Iranian again, just like anyone else in these crowded streets. He called his cousin to say that he was in town, but there was no answer at the house so he left a message. Then he called Reza to say he was on his way. The young scientist sounded happy. He proposed that they have dinner together later, and talk about the old days. Reza said he had a girlfriend, at last. Maybe they could meet her after dinner. Karim was pleased. Perhaps this would all be easier than he thought. In and out, and away to a new life.

The Green Express train
from Tehran to Mashad took twelve hours. A solitary traveler had reserved one of the four-bunk compartments in first class. He lay on his bed, fully clothed, as the train sped overnight across the mountains that gird northeastern Iran. Open beside him was an Arabic translation of
The World Is Flat,
by Thomas Friedman, with notations in the margin. The man slept fitfully, awaking from time to time to relight his opium pipe and then drift back into a hazy region of consciousness that was not quite sleep. Outside his door, a guard kept watch through the night. The conductors on the train were frightened of the guard, and even more of the man inside the compartment.

Al-Majnoun, the Crazy One, had a rendezvous in Mashad. He had made the mistake of allowing danger to accumulate—of permitting a threat to continue, unimpeded, until it became so dangerous that it could destroy the enterprise itself. That was the difficulty of moving subtly and alone, as was his practice. Sometimes events moved so quickly that you could not keep up with them. You became so swaddled in secrets that you could not move a muscle. That could not happen in this case. If he failed here, even his own fearsome powers of violence would not protect him.

The train arrived in Mashad in early morning. The Crazy One descended from the carriage, carrying a Tumi briefcase that contained two lightweight automatic pistols, of different makes and vintages. He was dressed in a black suit, over a black merino wool sweater. He wore a cloth cap and sunglasses that partially hid his face, but in the glint of the morning, the scars were red and visible. It was a face that seemed to have been constructed with a putty knife; with little bits of flesh not quite adhering to the template of bone. It needed more skin or less. There had been another recent surgery, and so little tissue left to work with.

The bodyguard made to follow, closely at first, but Al-Majnoun waved him away. He walked with a stoop, and a stutter of the legs that was not quite a limp. He was agile, for all that. The legs moved in quick little steps, the body pitching forward at a slight angle, the briefcase tight against his side. He left the station and headed out onto Azadi Street, where he found a taxi. He placed a call to a contact in Tehran, and then another call, and then he wrote down an address in a tiny notebook little bigger than a deck of cards, which he kept in the pocket of his coat.

He told the driver to take him to the Iran Hotel on Andarzgu Street, close by the Shrine of Imam Reza. A colleague he had dispatched urgently from Tehran the day before was waiting for him there. The bodyguard followed in a second taxi.

Mehdi Esfahani sat at
his table in the hotel restaurant, stroking the prickly hairs of his goatee. He wondered if the time had come to shave it off, to go without any sort of facial hair, as some of the bolder young officers at the Etelaat were doing. The waiter brought his eggs, sunny-side up. He closed his eyes. Perhaps with no mustache and a new haircut, he would look like George Clooney.

Through the window he could see the green dome of the Great Mosque of Gohar Shad, in the sacred precincts of the old city. He had received a call from Al-Majnoun the day before back in Tehran, instructing him to travel by air to Mashad.

“The hour has come,” Al-Majnoun had said. The great conspiracy was ripening and about to burst visibly to light. The interrogator should take a room overnight at the Iran hotel and wait for him at breakfast. He should tell no one at the Etelaat, and he should come armed.

The interrogator had booked the hotel room and the flight by himself. But he was uncomfortable. Al-Majnoun frightened him. He had done as the Lebanese operative had demanded, from the moment a few months before when they had first glimpsed a hint of this penetration of the inner secrets of the project. And he had not briefed his superiors on his work, as Al-Majnoun insisted. The Lebanese operative was the secret arm of the Leader himself; they wrote poetry for each other, so it was whispered. They were in the last inner chamber of the black box that was the ruling mechanism of Iran. To refuse his orders would be a deadly mistake.

But still, Mehdi was a careful man. He never left everything in one basket. So he had kept a log of his activities. And before he left for Mashad the previous day, he had sent a note to his top boss, the Revolutionary Guard officer responsible for security of the entire nuclear program, saying that he was going on an operational mission to Mashad, and that if he did not return for some reason, someone from the Etelaat-e Sepah should enter his office and remove a dossier that explained a secret and most sensitive investigation he had been conducting at the personal request of the Leader’s special adviser. Al-Majnoun would expect as much, surely. No man goes on an operation where he has been instructed to bring a firearm without protecting himself.

Mehdi was waiting for
the Crazy One, but he was startled none theless. The Lebanese crept up, approaching from behind so quickly that he escaped Mehdi’s peripheral vision. The interrogator felt a hand on his shoulder, and then he turned suddenly to see that ghastly, doughy face. Al-Majnoun sat down. The sunglasses concealed his eyes. But even so, he looked different than the last time Mehdi had seen him. If he hadn’t known to expect him, he could not have been sure that he was the same man Mehdi had met before. But that was the way with Al-Majnoun. He was a
jinn
, a black ghost of the spirit world more than a normal man.

“The worst has happened,” said Al-Majnoun in a hoarse whisper. “The foreign spies are in our midst. They have their hands at our throat. Today is the day that we will expose them, and cut them out.”

Mehdi nodded. He had known from his first encounter with the Lebanese operative that he would someday find himself in a place like this with the target in his sites. Al-Majnoun would not fail. He had the scent in his nose, from the first. He would follow it across the planet, but he would track it down eventually. And Mehdi was his chosen partner. He wanted to call his boss at the Etelaat, more to make sure he got credit than to protect himself.

“Who is it, General? Is it one of the men from Tohid or another establishment? Is it the scientist who studied in Germany?”

“You will see in a few hours, my brother,” said Al-Majnoun. He spoke in his Arabic-accented Farsi, so sharp and guttural, so lacking in cultivation, so edged with poison. “In a few hours, you will be a hero. And I will vanish again.”

Mehdi took his fingers to his goatee and twirled the little hairs at the bottom until they were as taut as a fine filament of wire.