Stephen Coonts: The Disciple

“Can we?”

“Not yet.”

“So how close is Iran to the bomb?”

“The only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know.”

Molina threw up his hands. He picked up a pencil from Grafton’s desk, twirled it for a moment, scratched his head with the eraser, then threw it at the wall. It fell behind a bookcase. “So what are you going to do about the good professor?”

“I’m going to sign him up to work for me, so we can get access to his Irani an network. And I’m going to have a man in Iran check on some of this information to see what is true and what isn’t.”

“You’re going to make Azari a double agent?”

“Going to give it a try,” Grafton said and sighed. “Of course, the shit could pretend to do as we say but warn the Iranians. If that happens, I’ll kill him.”

Molina’s jaw dropped. “You wouldn’t do that,” he said.

Grafton didn’t say a word.

“You wouldn’t do that,” Molina repeated.

“Oh, of course not,” Grafton replied.

Sal Molina took a deep breath, then let it all out slowly. “The Israelis are running out of patience. Their ambassador told the president that the government of Israel is under extreme pressure to act now, before Iran can put warheads on missiles.”

Grafton scratched his head.

“What kind of a network do the Israelis have in Iran?” Molina asked.

“They have a few agents there. Every now and then they tell us something we didn’t know, but I wouldn’t bet real money that they’re showing us all their cards.”

“Do we show them all of ours?”

“Most of them, anyway.”

“What do they think of Azari’s information?”

“I haven’t asked them.”

Molina seemed content to move on. “If those nuclear facilities are bombed, a lot of radiation is going into the atmosphere. It’ll fall out all over the place. A lot of people are going to be poisoned.” He thought about that, then added, “If there is any uranium there.”

“The mullahs put a lot of their facilities around Tehran for just that reason,” Grafton remarked.

“It didn’t work,” Molina shot back. “I don’t think the Israelis give a damn about radiation contamination in Iran. Staying alive is the Israeli problem, not saving Iranians.” He tapped on the desk with a finger, then traced a small circle with a fingertip while staring at the wall with unseeing eyes.

“The longer we wait to attack,” Grafton said, breaking the silence, “the more enriched uranium the Iranians will have. They continue to harden their facilities. In other words, the longer we wait, the worse the contamination will be and the less likely it is that a conventional attack will do enough damage to halt their weapons program. The window for military action is sliding closed. The Iranians know that, and have dragged out the diplomatic process for precisely that reason.”

Molina’s eyes snapped into focus on Grafton’s face. “The president doesn’t have a political consensus. Until he gets one, the United States is not taking military action against Iran. Nor will we help Israel do it. And the president isn’t going to get a consensus until you prove beyond a reasonable doubt what Ahmadinejad plans to do with his missiles and warheads.”

When I finished my workday at the embassy annex, I walked out onto the bustling streets of Tehran and drew in a refreshing lungful of heavily polluted air. Ah, yes, the great outdoors for me!

Taking in the sights and sounds and listening to the roar of endless traffic, I strolled the three blocks to my hotel-actually a nice hotel designed, built and run by a European chain-and walked through the lobby. Yep, the secret police guy was sitting in his usual chair, in his usual rumpled trousers, dirty shirt and worn jacket. I didn’t know if he was an employee of the MOIS-Ministry of Intelligence and Security-or the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guard, the mullahs’ Gestapo, nor did I care. His job was keeping tabs on us diplomats. Since I had been in Iran, I had made him and his pals work at keeping track of me.

Housekeeping had tidied up my small room, which was bugged. I had amused myself one evening a couple of weeks ago by searching the place. I found three bugs that were hardwired in place. Yesterday I put switches on all three of the wires, so I could turn the bugs on and off whenever I chose. But I left them on, at least for now. If the Iranians wanted to listen to me snore, fart and take a whiz, so be it.

As I mentioned, I only sweated for Uncle Sam four hours a day at the annex, leaving the rest of the day open for clandestine activities. Unfortunately, up to now there hadn’t been any of those. In case there ever were, I kept myself busy learning the town. I had strolled through and perused the collections in almost every museum in Tehran, seen all the religious sites that were open to non-Muslims and looked at all the big public stuff, like railroad stations, bus stations, luxurty hotels and the like. No doubt these expeditions were enlightening for my MOIS tails, on those occasions when they bothered to follow. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t.

This afternoon I changed into my running gear, paused at the door to breathe deeply of filtered, conditioned air, then took the elevator down.

I walked through the lobby without glancing at the watcher and went out the wide double doors onto the street. Left today, I decided, just for variety; I made the turn and started jogging. After a mile I picked up the pace. When I crossed at street corners I usually glanced around for traffic… and to see if anyone was jogging along behind me. Tonight no one was. The first week I had about given heart attacks to two guys in street clothes who tried to match my pace. They had used cars the second week, but with Tehran traffic being what it is, I generally made better time than the automobiles could, and soon they lost sight of me. These days they usually didn’t bother trying to follow.

As I ran, I thought back to my last interview with Jake Grafton. We were sitting in his office at Langley, just the two of us, and little shafts of spring sunshine streamed through the double-paned security windows and played on the floor and furniture. Outside, the leaves on the trees danced in the breeze, so the sun’s rays came and went, almost as if they were alive.

“Azari has been publishing the information collected by his network for several years now, airing Iran’s deepest secrets in America for anyone with a dollar and a half to buy a Sunday newspaper,” Grafton said. “His activities could not have escaped the attention of Iranian security.”

I sat there thinking about that. After several deep breaths, I said, “Why don’t you tell me all of it?”

He looked me over one more time, then rose out of his chair. “Come on,” he said. We went all the way down to the basement of the building, Grafton leading the way, until we entered a large room with four big tables, the kind they hold church dinners on. They were covered with paper.

Grafton started at the table nearest the door. “Here is a copy of Azari’s book, published last year”-he held it up-“and here are his three op-ed pieces for the Sunday papers.” He displayed them. “About three years ago we cracked the crypto code he and his agent in Tehran use to communicate. Here are their messages.” He let me examine them. They were lying on the table, arranged in chronological order. “Twenty-seven of them, so far,” Grafton murmured.

“Finally, here are the facts as the book sets them forth. Factories, locations, missile sites, names of officials, all of it.” All this was arranged on a large chart, with every entry numbered, so it could be cross-referenced. The references were piles of paper that covered the surface of the other tables, each pile numbered. Someone had spent a lot of time constructing the chart and checking every reference.