Stephen Coonts - The Disciple

She made a gesture of irritation, got out of bed and began dressing. The cigarette dangled from her lips, and smoke curled up around her head.

“The Supreme Leader says the MOIS and the Qods Force work for him,” she said, “and he will ensure they obey God’s laws. So they beat an old man to death, a scholar and philosopher who did no one any harm.”

She pulled on her skirt, worked it around her hips into position and fumbled with the top button. Ash from her cigarette fell to the carpet, and she ignored it. I couldn’t help noticing that she had a really nice set of legs. Actually, everything was very nice. Trim, taut, athletic… perfect.

“There is a serious problem with people who think they are doing God’s work,” she said bitterly. “Once moral ambiguity is eliminated, every human equation evaluates to infinity. Without moral ambiguity, people become capable of anything-any arrogance, any conceit, any gross stupidity.”

Still naked from the waist up, she took a drag on the cigarette and blew smoke around while she eyed me. “Any crime, any atrocity. Mass murder? Nuclear war? Believe me, our holy men are perfectly capable of pulling the trigger.”

Georgetown had several dozen funky restaurants, and Professor Azari liked most of them. Small and intimate, they had an ambience he found pleasant; the staff always had a smile and kind word, and if he ordered carefully, the food was usually excellent. A man could ask for no more.

Today he sat outdoors in a small courtyard at a table in the shade of a tree. This was, he supposed, one of his favorite restaurants, and he amused himself by tabulating the ones he liked the best. He ordered a salad with a flavor he thought would be unique. The waitress, who had served him for years, had prevailed upon him to try it, so he had thrown caution to the winds and said yes.

With the salad he ordered a dry white wine. He marveled at the exquisite taste of it and took the tiniest sips he could, to make it last.

When a man he knew came in and sat across the room, Azari ignored him. He finished the wine before the salad and gave in to temptation-he ordered another glass. The salad, when it came, was indeed superb.

He had finished his meal and paid the bill and was sipping a cup of coffee when the man he knew rose from the table where he had lunched and departed. Azari rose, too, smiled at the waitress and made his way out.

The man was walking up the street. Azari followed him, half a block behind. After two blocks, the man paused to read a historical sign on a building-one of many such signs in Georgetown-and Azari caught up with him. He, too, paused in front of the sign.

“The CIA has bought it. Iran is at least a year away from operational nuclear weapons,” Azari said. “The man who talks to me is named Grafton. He says various people high in the government still refuse to believe there is a weapons program. However, the government is trying to formulate a policy, in the event the CIA is right.”

“Who in the government?”

“He did not say. ‘Highly placed people’ was the phrase he used.”

“Very well,” the man said. He turned and walked away.

Azari turned toward the university, which was five blocks away in another direction. A block from the university a man sitting in a car rolled down the window and motioned to him. He got into the passenger seat.

“You did well,” Jake Grafton told him.

“You got it, then?”

Grafton nodded.

“How did you know he would want to talk to me?”

“Just a hunch.”

“How do you know he didn’t follow me toward the university, to see if I talked to anyone?”

Grafton picked up a walkie-talkie from the seat beside him. “We’re keeping an eye on him. You’re clean.”

“You people are watching me day and night,” Azari said accusingly.

Jake Grafton’s voice hardened. “This isn’t a gentleman’s game we’re playing, Professor. Lives are on the line, including yours. Keep that fact firmly in mind.”

Grafton eyed Azari, then continued. “Better be on your way. Wouldn’t want you late for class.”

The professor got out of the vehicle, closed the door firmly to ensure it latched, then walked on toward the main entrance of the university. He didn’t look behind him.

I was unlocking the bike in front of the party house when Davar’s cell phone rang. She listened a moment, glanced at me and muttered something into the instrument that I didn’t catch.

She turned off the phone and said, “Ghasem wants to talk to you. I suggested that we meet him at the metro station at Azadi Square.”

“Okay.”

Was the MOIS listening to these cell conversations? Were they watching any of us? Were they incompetent, or were they giving us enough rope to hang ourselves? I wondered how much more time we had.

I rode along thinking about a wall and a blindfold and a firing squad. Of course, this far east of Europe firing squads were probably obsolete; in these climes some holy warrior would merely put a pistol against your skull and pull the trigger.

Perhaps I should cut and run right now.

I was mulling the possibilities when I realized Davar was talking about the people at the party as she rode along behind me. She was speaking loudly, so I would hear. One of the lawyers, a woman, was a women’s rights activist and a political force to be reckoned with. She had been arrested several times for political reasons and had led a campaign to prevent the legislature from passing a proposal that would have allowed a husband to take a second wife without the permission of the first wife.

On she chattered, detailing the careers, prospects and political aspirations of many of the prominent young people of Tehran, most of whom she knew, and all of whom she admired.

“Iran is not a nation of religious fanatics out to murder anyone who doesn’t believe as they do. Iran is a nation of young people, seventy percent of whom are under thirty-five years of age, trying to find their place in the world and make a contribution. Someday we will defeat the fundamentalists. Then this nation will bloom and take its rightful place in the world.”

I had no answer to that. It looked to me as if the God Squad had a pretty firm grip on things around here. They were arresting people for political protests and convicting them of treason, executing women by hanging and stoning… All in all, the place looked like I imagined Nazi Germany looked in the 1930s, complete with goon squads and Gestapo. They even had a dictator with a direct telephone line to God. All they needed to do to make Iran perfect was to declare war on the rest of the human race, and it looked to me as if Ahmadinejad just might do it.

I didn’t say any of this to Davar, of course. I didn’t have the heart.

In the Pentagon the plans for conventional strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were coming together slowly. There were a lot of problems, as Jake Grafton expected. The reactors were easy to hit, but the uranium processing facilities, the bomb factory and the missile factories were all underground. Many of the key facilities were under Tehran. The distances involved meant that all the strike planes, including navy planes launched from aircraft carriers, would have to be refueled, some of them twice, a few three times. Tanker assets would have to come from all over the world.

And since it was assumed that Iran would be launching cruise missiles, some of them armed with nuclear warheads, a lot of fighters would need to be in the air to shoot them down and protect the strike birds from Iranian fighters.

Ballistic missiles that flew up and out of the atmosphere, then reentered on a steep dive to their targets, were an entirely different problem. Fighter aircraft lacked the weapons to knock them down.