Stephen Coonts - The Disciple

Damn!

If Sultani didn’t have the information, then the minister of weapons of mass destruction might. Hosseini-Tash. That fool.

After Ghasem replaced all the files in the safe, he used muscle to swing the heavy door back into the closed position. He turned the great latch lever, then spun the dial until the safe locked again.

If Habib Sultani were to be sent to a sanitarium, Ghasem’s access to the building would be terminated. He needed to get the information Tommy Carmellini wanted, or get Carmellini in here to crack a safe, before that happened.

Ghasem stood staring at his uncle, who was sitting rigidly on his prayer rug, lost in his own private hell. Sultani’s eyes were completely unfocused.

Ghasem pulled the door shut behind him and stood in the empty waiting area trying to think.

Ghasem knew that he didn’t have any more time. Sometime later today people would discover that Habib Sultani had suffered a severe mental breakdown.

Now. He had to get Carmellini in here now to open the safe in HosseiniTash’s office.

If you’ve ever contemplated how a condemned man might feel as he stands against the wall puffing his last cigarette, with the firing squad at order arms ten paces away and the officer holding the blindfold standing nearby looking at his watch, then you might have a fair idea of how I felt those days in Iran.

I woke up that morning, looked out the window at the eastern sky turning pink, wondered if I would be dead in a week or wishing I were and sat on the edge of the bed contemplating my toes.

There were ten of them. This was not due to any virtue of mine or choice that I made but was dictated by the human genome. I assumed my genes were also heavily influenced by the fact that my parents and grandparents apparently liked people with ten fingers and ten toes and chose mates accordingly. Or maybe the people they liked just came equipped that way. I made a mental note to ask Charles Darwin about that if I ran into him anytime soon.

I put on my running duds and pulled socks over those ten little masterpieces.

I put on my fanny pack, stuffed diplomatic passport, hotel room keys and car keys in there, and let myself out into the empty hallway. No one else was stirring at dawn in Tehran.

The lobby was empty. At this hour, even the MOIS man was still home in bed.

I was out on the street working up to cruise speed when a car slowed beside me. I glanced over and saw Ghasem Murad at the wheel. He jerked his head, telling me to get in.

I glanced around to see who was keeping tabs on me. I knew in my bones that someone was, and that someone would report seeing Ghasem and me together. I got into his car anyway.

He handed me a copy of the Jihad missile target list. I hadn’t seen anything like that before, although Jake Grafton told me about it. Tel Aviv, Baghdad, all those American air military bases and Tehran.

Tehran!

So Jake Grafton was right. Ahmadinejad was going to murder his own people to give himself a political boost worldwide.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked Ghasem as we rolled through traffic.

“The safe of the minister of defense. It’s not in the format of a classified document that must be accounted for. That blob at the bottom? Someone has blacked out the original document control number.”

“Where are the missiles?”

“That information wasn’t in the safe.”

“Bummer, dude,” I muttered. Can you imagine a government having missiles with nuke warheads ready to go, targets picked, the date set, and not telling the minister of defense where the missiles were? “I hope your uncle has his postretirement years all planned out,” I added. “Looks like he’s there.”

“He’s having a nervous breakdown.”

I stared. “That’s one way to spend those years, I suppose. He in the hospital?”

“In his office. I believe you Americans and British might say that he’s ‘flipped out.’ ”

I kept my mouth shut.

“You need to get into the safe in Hosseini-Tash’s office right now,” Ghasem continued. “This morning, while I still have access.”

Ransacking a safe, sorting through hundreds of files written in a language I barely understood, looking for The One, which might or might not be there, was impractical. It would take all night, and I couldn’t stay anywhere near that long. What I needed was computer hard drives…

“Where else can the information be?” I asked Ghasem. “Targets get picked, then someone must do a ton of math for the ballistic missiles, plan routes for the cruise missiles… Where do they do that?”

“The Targeting Office,” he said. “It’s in the basement of the senior officers’ wing.” He described its exact location, even drew me a map, showing me the number of doors from the end of the hallway and the Targeting Office’s location in relation to the stairwell.

“What’s on the door?” I asked.

He drew the inscription in Farsi.

“Have you ever been in there?” I asked.

“No. Access is very restricted.”

Well, it sounded more promising than the head dog’s office. Hell, Hosseini-Tash was probably just another paper pusher.

“I’ll go in with you,” Ghasem said.

I glanced at him to see if this was a serious offer or a social one. He looked serious as an undertaker, but through the years I had found I worked best alone. I told him that now.

He didn’t say anything, merely stared at the cars in front of us. When we came to a red light, he leaned forward, put his forehead on the top of the steering wheel and closed his eyes. “The MOIS took my roommate away early this morning. Mostafa Abtahi. He said you were the one who gave him his visa. For a little while he was the happiest man in Iran. Thank you for that.”

The truck behind us beeped its horn.

When Ghasem straightened up and got the car in motion, I said, “Tonight you need to be in a very public place with lots of people who know you. Now let me out at the next traffic light.”

I crawled into my telephone booth at the embassy and called Jake Grafton. I told him about my conversation with Ghasem and the Jihad list he showed me. I also told him that Mostafa Abtahi, one of the guys he finagled a tourist visa for on my behalf, had been arrested by the MOIS.

“What about Qomi?” he asked.

“I put him on a plane. He should be over the Atlantic or in America.”

“You can’t save the world, Tommy,” he remarked.

We chatted a bit about the schedule for the evening, then said our good-byes.

I sat in my little cocoon breathing deeply.

Jake Grafton hung up his satellite phone and looked across the table at Sal Molina. “Tommy is going into the Defense Ministry building tonight,” he said.

“Is that wise? If he’s caught…”

Jake Grafton reached onto the table behind him for a large-scale map of Iran. He placed it between himself and the president’s aide. Using his finger, he began pointing out symbols. “Using satellite photography and single-side band radar, we have verified eighteen sites where these people have missiles. We believe there are at least twenty-five sites. There may be more. We must know which of these sites has nuclear weapons and which doesn’t. Tommy is going to try to find out.”

“He’s going to dig through a safe for an Iranian government document which may or may not be genuine?”

“Get real, Sal. He’ll be stealing computer hard drives.”

“How do you know he’s getting the real thing?” Molina demanded. “Maybe it’s a setup. Maybe these assholes are jerking us around like Saddam did. We can’t afford another Iraq, Jake-that would sink this president.”

“There is no way on earth to be absolutely certain about anything,” Jake Grafton shot back. “If we demand an impossible standard of proof, we will only be certain that we know nothing at all.”