Joel Rosenberg - The Twelfth Imam

“We should go,” Najjar said, glancing at his watch. “We’re not safe here anymore.”

But David pulled out his phone. “I can help you, Najjar,” he said calmly. “One phone call, and I can get you and your family out of this country forever. I can get you set up in America with a new life, safe from your enemies here. But first you need to answer all of my questions.”

“I’m telling you what I know. I’ll tell you more. But not here.”

“Najjar, you came to me,” David reminded him. “You obviously believe I will help you, and I will. But I need to know-who sent you to me?”

“Please, Mr. Tabrizi,” Najjar implored. “My family is not safe. I must get back to them.”

“We will pay you. More money than you’ve ever seen.”

“I’m not doing this for money! I’m doing this for my family.”

“Then just tell me. Who sent you? It’s a simple question. Give me a name.”

“It’s not that simple,” Najjar said.

“The name, Najjar; just give me the name.”

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Zalinsky’s phone rang.

It was Tom Murray from the CIA’s Global Operations Center.

“Talk to me, Jack. What have you got?”

“It’s not good,” Zalinsky said. “Best we can tell, the Iranians have tracked down Najjar Malik. They’ve dispatched about a dozen police and intelligence units to pick him up. They should be there any moment.”

“So what do we do now?”

“I’m working on it, sir.”

“What about your man in Tehran?” Murray asked.

“He’s been working on this nonstop,” Zalinsky explained. “But at this point, I don’t think there’s anything more he can do.”

“Call him,” Murray ordered. “We can’t let this guy slip away. The Israelis are on edge. They’re 100 percent sure now the Hamadan earthquake was triggered by a nuclear test, and the president is afraid Naphtali is going to launch a preemptive strike. If the Iranians get Malik…”

Murray didn’t finish his sentence, but he didn’t have to. Zalinsky promised to get back to Murray in a few minutes, then hung up and speed-dialed Eva.

“Get me Zephyr.”

Tehran, Iran

David wasn’t sure how to respond.

He’d asked for a name, and Najjar had given him a name. It just wasn’t one he could possibly have expected. In any other country, at any other time, the whole notion would have been ludicrous. But with all that had been happening in recent weeks…

“Let me make sure I have this straight,” David said. “You were a Twelver. But you’ve converted to Christianity because you saw a vision of Jesus. And now you’re saying that Jesus told you to come here and meet me? That doesn’t strike you as strange?”

“Not that strange. It happened in the New Testament all the time,” Najjar said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Jesus told people things were going to happen, and they happened.”

“Really.”

“Jesus sent people to certain places and they went. Jesus told Ananias to go to Straight Street in Damascus and heal a blind man named Saul of Tarsus at the house of Judas, and Ananias did it. He didn’t know Saul. He’d never seen Saul. The Lord just led him, and he obeyed.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that Jesus sent you to me?” David asked.

“Believe it or don’t believe it; I’m sitting here, aren’t I?”

He certainly was, and David realized he had entered an entirely different dimension. He had come to Iran to engage in a clandestine geopolitical war but had come face-to-face with something else entirely. There was a spiritual battle going on for this country unlike anything he had ever heard of or imagined, and he wasn’t prepared for any of it. People were talking about visions of the Twelfth Imam and visions of Jesus as if such events were commonplace. What’s more, it was becoming clear that the people of Iran were being asked to choose sides between the two.

It occurred to David that he wouldn’t have even known the name Najjar Malik or his importance to the Iranian nuclear program if it hadn’t been for Dr. Birjandi-a brilliant octogenarian former Shia Muslim scholar who sometime in the past few years had secretly renounced Islam and become a follower of Jesus. What’s more, according to Birjandi, more than a million Shia Muslims in Iran had converted to Christianity in the past three decades. Many of them had converted after seeing dreams and visions, he said, and more were converting every day. In a strange sort of way, while Najjar Malik’s story was far outside of anything David had ever experienced, it did have a certain logic to it.

The ultimate proof, perhaps, was in the laptop, and David was eager to see it. Just then, his phone rang. It was not a welcome call. Not at the moment.

“Hey, I really can’t talk right now,” he told Eva. “I’ll call you back.”

“Actually, this can’t wait,” Eva said.

“This really isn’t a good time.”

“Too bad.”

“Why? What’s the problem?”

“It’s your expense reports, Reza. They’re still not in order. The boss wants to talk to you about them before he heads into a budget meeting.”

“Fine,” he said. “Tell him I’ll call in a few minutes.”

He hung up the phone and turned to watch a jogger running through the park. He followed the man for a moment and scanned the woods to see if there was anyone else around. For now, they were still alone. But Najjar was right; they couldn’t stay much longer. They had to keep moving or be questioned by the next patrol car that came through the park. But there was something he had to do first.

“Where is the laptop now?” David asked.

“In the trunk,” Najjar said.

“Can I see it?”

“Do we have a deal?”

“If you have what you say you have, then yes, we have a deal.”

They got out of the car, and Najjar opened the trunk. Sure enough, there, wrapped in a motel blanket, were a Sony VAIO laptop, an external hard drive, and a plastic bag filled with DVDs. Najjar powered up the laptop and briefly showed David some of the files and e-mails he’d been describing.

Thunderstruck by what was in front of him, David told Najjar to gather it all and bring it up to the front passenger seat.

“I’m going to drive,” he said. “You’re going to read to me.”

“Where are we going?” Najjar asked.

“Where’s your family?”

“In a motel near the airport.”

“We need to get them, and fast.”

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

For Eva’s taste, information wasn’t flowing fast enough.

It was taking too long for the NSA to transcribe and interpret the intercepted calls and get them to her and Zalinsky. So Eva called her NSA counterpart and insisted she and Jack be able to listen in to any of the intercepted calls in real time, only to be told that such a request couldn’t be made by someone at her level but had to come from at least the CIA’s deputy director for operations.

Furious, Eva slammed down the phone and drafted a memo to Tom Murray to that effect. She e-mailed it to Zalinsky for his approval, then walked over to his office to follow up, wondering as she walked how exactly they were supposed to fight and win the war on terror with such insane bureaucratic constraints. She knocked on the door and popped her head in as Zalinsky was picking up the phone.

“Code in,” he said.

“Is that Zephyr?” she whispered.