The Increment (6 page)

“I have told you everything, Brother Inspector. I denied nothing, because there is nothing to hide. My father warned me about the foreign spies and their tricks. We talked about it before I left Tehran. Your people warned me. Before, during, after. That is why I was careful. That is why avoided the German girls.”

“Who is Hans?”

The young man shifted awkwardly in his chair. The sweat started again.

“Who is Hans?” repeated the interrogator. “We know that Trudi received messages from him. But we think there was no Hans. We think this was a code name.”

The young Iranian felt a rattle inside, a tremor that wanted to come out. It was like a suppressed sneeze that left you quivering. They knew. It was useless to lie. If this was his crime, he would survive.

“I was Hans,” he said.

“Why did you use a code name? If this relationship was so innocent and you had nothing to hide, why did you make up a false name?

How could he explain? The truth was so pathetic. “Hans” was his imaginary name for himself. He had begun calling himself that in his mind when he first arrived as a student in Heidelberg. It began as a defense. He was embarrassed about his big nose, and his thick black hair that always looked greasy, even when he had just washed it. He wanted to have cold blue eyes and frozen blood in his veins, like the German boys, and not to have emotions that were always about to boil over like the water in a teakettle. He wanted a hairless body like the German boys, instead of his matted torso from the monkey world of the East. He wanted one of the big-breasted German girls who made him hard when he was sitting at his desk in the library, trying to read his physics text books. He was embarrassed about who he was, so in his mind, he imagined another person who was living inside this Iranian body, and that person’s name was “Hans.”

“I was ashamed,” said the young man. “I was embarrassed to be an Iranian, so I made up this German name for myself. Trudi thought it was funny. So when I sent her an email or I called her, I would say, ‘This is Hans.’”

The interrogator shook his head. “That story is completely absurd, Doctor. But that does not mean it is true.”

Mehdi Esfahani continued with
his questions for another two hours. He asked about details of the meetings with Trudi, and about what she had asked him. He asked the young man to repeat several times the story of how he had broken off his contact with Trudi, after she propositioned him, and he got him to admit that one reason he had done so was that he was afraid she was a spy. His father had warned him about spies, and yes, he was afraid that she might be one. She had tried to contact him again, several times, but he had not responded. That was the truth. That was what made it easy.

The questions continued, but the interrogator already seemed to know the answers, and it became increasingly obvious that the real point of this interview had been to see if the young man lied. Their agent in the German security service, whoever he was, had told them that Trudi’s contacts with the Iranian boy at the Max Planck Institute had come to nothing. But they wanted to see for themselves.

There was a pause, at the end of one more string of questions about Trudi’s efforts to reestablish contact, after he had broken it off.

“How do you know when you’re a redneck?” asked Esfahani.

“I am very sorry, sir. I am sure that I do not know.”

“You know you’re a redneck when you light a match in the bathroom and it blows your house off its wheels.”

The young man stared at the interrogator. Finally he understood. He tried to laugh, feebly.

“Really, you are pathetic. No sense of humor. That is the only thing that is suspicious about you. A normal man has a life. He is married by now. He is not so careful. But you, I do not understand. What are you so afraid of? Why don’t you start living?”

The young man felt
light-headed that afternoon when he returned to his apartment in Yoosef Abad. He had a peculiar feeling of invulnerability, like a man who has been shot at close range and survived. It was not the time for him to be caught. He was a fatalist in that way. If it had been time, he would have panicked in the interrogation room and confessed to his real sin. If it had been time, he would have told a lie they could easily have discovered. If it had been time, he would be spending this night in prison.

But it was not time. It was not God’s will that he should be caught, so it must be God’s will that he should not be caught. They were looking for him, but they did not see. He was invisible. If he could drop a pebble into the water, he could drop a stone.

Late that afternoon, Mehdi
Esfahani received a visit from a man he knew only by his Arabic pseudonyms. He was sometimes called
Al-Sadiq
, “the Friend,” but more often he was referred to as
Al-Majnoun,
“the Crazy One,” by the few Iranians who knew of his existence. That was the name Mehdi knew him by. His real name was Badr, or Sadr, or something else entirely, nobody seemed to be sure. Mehdi Esfahani was a powerful man in the intelligence service, and he was frightened of few people. But he was frightened by Al-Majnoun.

Al-Majnoun was a Lebanese Shiite who had come to Tehran in the mid-1980s. It was said by the few people who claimed to know anything about him that he had been involved in the kidnapping and torture of the CIA station chief in Beirut in 1984, and that he had needed to escape to Iran to cool down. He had taken up a kind of permanent shadow residence in Tehran, under the patronage of a wing of the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence service. He operated independently of the normal bureaucracies—both at the Guard and the intelligence ministry. He was a lone wolf, an enforcer. It was said that he was sent on special projects, at home and abroad, and that he had unusually wide latitude. When people in the regular services tried to question his missions, or even to probe for details, they usually regretted it. In two cases, it was said that his rivals had ended up dead—in cases that were never explained even to officials at the highest level.

That was why people in the bureaucracies were afraid of “the Crazy One.” It was clear that he had the most powerful patronage—some even whispered that he reported ultimately to the Supreme Leader himself and was his personal intelligence adviser. There were stories that the two men liked to visit together, and lie on the tufted cushions of the leader’s palace reading each other couplets of ancient Persian and Arabic poetry. But nobody knew. That was the problem. And so when Al-Majnoun knocked on Mehdi’s door late that afternoon, the interrogator worried that he had done something very wrong.

“Allah y’atik al afia,”
said the Crazy One, in Lebanese Arabic dialect. He had learned to speak passable Farsi, but he often lapsed into his own language.

The Lebanese was not an imposing man, physically. He was gaunt and walked with a bit of a stoop and shuffle, as if he were an older man. He usually wore sunglasses, even indoors, which was partly to mask his appearance and partly to hide the scars from his surgeries. It was this plastic surgery that made Al-Majnoun such a singular person, and gave him a transient, elusive appearance. It was said that he had been operated on at least twice to disguise his appearance after he fled Beirut. The surgeries had left traces of two different faces. There was one above the mouth—the soft eyes, rounded nose, and prominent cheekbones of a European—and one below. That second face had a cruel Eastern set to the mouth and chin. It was a face that was going in two directions at once, it seemed, and there were the odd little lumps of tissue that remained from the several surgeries. It was more a mask, really, than a face.

Mehdi wished his visitor good health and bid him take a seat. He inquired what had brought such a senior figure to this humble outpost of the far-flung realms of intelligence.

“I have a new assignment,” said Al-Majnoun. He took off his sunglasses as he spoke, revealing the eyes. The surgeon had botched his work around the edges, leaving little lines where the skin had been cut and drawn and the stitches sewed.

“What is that assignment, General? I am sure that I am at your service.” The interrogator didn’t know how to address his guest, so he chose a high military rank.

“I have been asked to look at penetration of the program.” Al-Majnoun did not have to say the nuclear weapons program. That much was understood.

“Why, General? Is there reason to be concerned?”

Al-Majnoun stroked his lower lip. It was tight, like the rest of his face. It was impossible to be sure whether these creased lips had been chapped from the wind and sun, or cut by the surgeon’s knife. He spoke in a voice that was thin and reedy, from high in the throat rather than deep down.

“Information is like the dust in the wind, Brother Inspector. We do not know where it is blowing. What we have is more like a feeling. Sometimes we know that a door is open, even if we do not see it or feel it. We sense a rustle of wind. Or there is a little flutter at a curtain. Or we hear a creak in the floor that should not be sounding. We sense it before we know it. Perhaps this is the same.”

“But is there a leak?”

Mehdi nervously fingered the hairs of his goatee between his thumb and forefinger. He feared that he was going to be blamed for something.

Al-Majnoun laughed. It sounded more like a cough, heavy with phlegm. “Not a leak, my friend. More like an opening through which a leak might pass.”

Mehdi nodded, but he didn’t understand. He wanted to show that he was doing his job, so that he wouldn’t be blamed later if something went wrong.

“We are always vigilant, General. I had a boy in here today, from the research center in Jamaran. Very sensitive work. I took him through his paces. We do that every day, sir. Every day, I assure you. A tight, serious boy, this one was. Studied in Germany.”

“Yes, I know,” said Al-Majnoun, nodding.

Mehdi continued on, thinking that Al-Majnoun was praising his work in general.

“This one gave the right answers. He did not lie. That is the best test. I think. One lie, and there will be others. But this one told me the truth.”

“Yes, I know,” repeated the Lebanese. This time Mehdi realized that he was referring specifically to the young physicist who had visited that afternoon. “I want to make sure that the boy’s case is handled…properly.”

“I keep the file open, General. I wait for the lie. But I am also opening another file, and another. That is the way for us, isn’t it? We must suspect everyone. But we must watch and wait for the case to play itself out, or else we have nothing. Isn’t that right?”

Al-Majnoun didn’t answer Mehdi Esfahani’s question. He put his sunglasses back on the bridge of his man-made nose, rose from his chair, and walked out of the room.

Harry Pappas got a
call in early August from the chief of the Information Operations Center. He supervised the agency’s public website, and he was cleared for the Dr. Ali special-access program. Pappas was at Bethany Beach with his wife and daughter, taking a few days of vacation and trying to forget how screwed up everything was. When he went walking along the beach at night, he heard his son’s voice in the waves—a hollow imaginary echo like the sound of the sea in a seashell. But he was glad of it. He worried sometimes now that he might forget what Alex had sounded like.

“I think your Iranian friend is back,” said the chief of the Information Operations Center.

“How’s that?” Pappas held his breath for a moment.

“We just got another message over the transom from Iran,” continued the IOC chief. “We ran traces. It’s from a sheet-metal factory in Shiraz, routed via a server in Turkey, but that’s chaff. The size of this message is larger, but the tags look similar. This guy is good.”

“Sweet,” said Pappas. “God is Great.”

He had been worried that Dr. Ali was dead. He hadn’t resumed communication after fifteen days as Pappas had requested, and he remained silent for the next thirty days. Pappas had been like an uptight parent waiting for a child to return home. What had gone wrong? They had spooked him. They had made a mistake without realizing it. The return message had scared him off. Or worse, he had been discovered. But now he was back.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Get it out of the system, right now. Give it a scrub. I’ll be back in Washington tonight.”

“What’s the rush? I thought you were on vacation.”

“We won’t get another chance like this. If it’s our man, we need to reel him in quick.”

Pappas drove the Jeep Cherokee back to Washington that afternoon. He apologized to his wife, but she was almost relieved. Harry was lost when they were alone. He had been away for a full year, in 2004, when he was in Baghdad. Now he was away even when he was at home. She had her own life. She taught at an elementary school in Fairfax. She spent her days around children, which helped take her mind off her dead son. She was going to yoga classes, and she had joined a book group where they drank wine and the divorced women talked about their sex lives. And she had her daughter Louise—“Lulu”—though the girl had become withdrawn since her brother died, as if she blamed the parents.

Harry said he would be back that weekend to pick Andrea up. She said that would be wonderful, but she knew she would be getting a ride home with friends.

Harry went straight to
the office. He blew into the main entrance, past the guards and the electronic entry gates. There was a warning sign in C Corridor,
FOREIGN LIAISON IN AREA
, and he saw a group of visitors he guessed were Malaysian or Indonesian, tidy little men in black suits. He bowled past them, up the ramp way into Persia House. His secretary had already left for the day, but the luminous, cherubic face of Hussein watched over the entry room. He went into his office, closed the door, and logged on to his secure computer.

When the new message came up, Pappas drank it down like a shot of whiskey. The message was in English, written in a kind of business code, as if the sender were discussing a commercial transaction. It began with an apology.

We are sorry. We received your message about sheet-metal orders, but we could not respond as you requested. Also, we do not like Hotmail anymore. We worry that our business competitors may be curious. We will use our own system. We will share an email account. The address is [email protected]. The password is “ebaga4X9.” Do not send messages to or from this account. Write messages, and save them, and we will look in the “saved messages” space. We are sorry that we cannot meet with you. It is not good business. You do not know this market, but we know. Do not contact us in any other way. We will arrange the business, not you. We cannot travel to other markets. We are very sorry, but it is not wise.

The message continued with some sentences in Persian. Pappas showed the text to an Iranian-American woman who had been cleared for the SAP. She said after an hour’s study that they were lines from Ferdowsi, perhaps the most famous poet in Iranian history. The translation read as follows:

He said, “Is it good or ill these signs portend?

When will my earthly life come to an end?

Who will come after me? Say who will own

This royal diadem, and belt, and throne.

Reveal this mystery, and do not lie—

Tell me this secret or prepare to die.”

The email also contained a technical document. That was the prize. That was what changed everything.

Pappas waited for Tony
Reddo and Adam Schwartz to analyze the details. They were seated at the little conference table in his airless office, studying the paper and trading quick technical comments that Harry didn’t understand. He tried to read the cable traffic from Dubai, but he couldn’t concentrate. Finally Schwartz spoke up.

“This is a big deal,” he said. “In fact, if it’s what we think it is, it’s a
really
big deal.”

“So what is it, goddammit? Don’t play with me, boys.”

“Do you know what a neutron generator is?” asked Reddo.

“It’s something that generates neutrons,” said Harry in exasperation. “That means no, I don’t know what it means.”

“A neutron generator is one of the ways you trigger a nuclear weapon.”

“Well, holy shit! That’s what this is about?”

Schwartz and Reddo both nodded.

“This is a lab report,” said Schwartz, the MIT whiz kid who worked for Arthur Fox. “It describes a test in which the researchers tried to make a neutron generator perform at the level needed to produce fission in the core of a nuclear bomb. But it malfunctioned.”

“Malfunctioned?”

“Yes. It didn’t work. This neutron generator is sort of like a fancy spark plug. They used to call its predecessor a ‘zipper,’ back in the Manhattan Project. Don’t ask me why. It’s sort of complicated: It starts with explosives, which create energy that heats up a wafer of deuterium. Ionizes it, to be precise. The explosion accelerates this ionized deuterium so it bombards a target of tritium, and it produces a whole lot of neutrons. And the neutrons create a runaway chain reaction in the plutonium core of the bomb. And then, boom! If you follow me.”

“I don’t have any fucking idea what you’re talking about, but so what? I take it this thing—whatever it is—would produce a nuclear explosion. If it worked.”

“Correct,” said Reddo. “This is one of the technical puzzles in building an actual nuclear weapon. In the test this message described, the neutron pulse fizzled. It would not have been able to start a proper chain reaction. But that isn’t the point: this document says the Iranians are building a triggering device. An initial test failed, but presumably more are planned.”

“Are they close?”

“I don’t know. From this document, there’s no way to know how serious the technical problems are, so we can’t really evaluate the message that’s being sent. If they keep trying it this way, they’ll keep failing. But they won’t, presumably.”

“It’s pretty fucking scary, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.” Reddo and Schwartz spoke the words in unison.

Pappas closed his eyes and tried to take in what he had just heard. This was the red flag—no, more than that, it was the wailing siren. If the message was true, the Iranians had restarted their covert weapons program. They had done some basic work on these problems through 2003, but then stopped. Or at least, that was what the agency had believed until about thirty seconds ago. Dr. Ali’s message described a failure. But if they solved the trigger problem and assembled enough fissionable material, they could test a nuclear weapon. And if they did
that,
then the whole world would be turned upside down.

Pappas summoned the members of his special-access program. He gathered them with a sense of foreboding. It wasn’t that he wanted to keep the intelligence to himself. He just knew that this was a piece of information that would carve its own course, like a flash flood, once it was let loose.

The Dr. Ali SAP
group met the next day. Fox had returned the previous night from his vacation house on Nantucket. He was tanned and relaxed. His face didn’t have Harry’s perpetual look of sleeplessness; he was innocent, in that way. He didn’t know the worst that life could do to someone. That was what made him talk like a tough guy; he had never really had to be very strong himself.

“We should go to the White House.” Those were Fox’s first words when they were seated in the conference room.

“For sure,” said Harry. “But not yet. We just got the damned message.”

“Don’t be absurd,” said Fox. “This is an Iranian declaration of war.”

“No it’s not. It’s a document we have barely had time to analyze. To the extent we understand the message, it’s telling us that they fucked something up. The White House doesn’t even know about Dr. Ali. Let’s not pull people’s chains downtown until we’re sure what we have here.”

“You don’t seem to understand, Harry. This is the breakout. They are back in the weaponization business. They’re working on the trigger for a bomb. They’re almost ready to test. That’s the message. Nothing else matters. We need to take this to the White House,
today.
If you won’t, I will. And the director will back me up. He wants it briefed to the national security adviser this afternoon.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I already asked him. Not to go behind your back. But I thought the admiral should be informed.” The director was a navy four-star, still serving in uniform. He liked to do things by the book, but in his job at the CIA, he wasn’t sure what the book was.

“You’re right,” said Harry. As much as he disliked Fox, he knew that he was correct. This wasn’t something to sit on. But he was worried just the same. Once something went downtown, you couldn’t control it anymore. It took on a life of its own.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘You’re right.’ Let’s go up to the seventh floor and see the director. And we’ll go downtown this afternoon, just like you wanted.”

Fox didn’t look happy in triumph. He was peeved that Harry would be coming along to the White House.