“Good to finally meet you, Agent Shirazi,” Murray said, shaking David’s hand warmly. “I’ve heard a lot of good things about you. Jack here speaks very highly of you. Please, have a seat.”
David smiled, thanked the DDO, and took his seat next to an expressionless Zalinsky. There was a knock on the door. Murray hit a button on the arm of his chair, which electronically unlocked the secure entrance. In came an attractive blonde in her late twenties or early thirties, wearing a conservative black suit, a robin’s egg blue silk blouse, black pumps, and a pearl necklace obscured somewhat by the Agency ID dangling from her neck.
“Sorry I’m late, sir,” she said with a slight European accent David pegged from northern Germany or perhaps Poland. “My flight just got in.”
“That’s fine, Agent Fischer,” Murray replied. “We’re just getting started. You know Jack Zalinsky.”
“Yes, good to see you again, Jack,” she said, her smile warm and genuine.
As the two shook hands, David couldn’t help but notice she was wearing a pale shade of pink nail polish but not a wedding or engagement ring.
“And this is Agent David Shirazi,” Murray said, “a fellow NOC.”
The last phrase caught David off guard. He hadn’t taken this woman as a nonofficial cover operative. An analyst, maybe, but undercover work? She was hardly the type to blend into the woodwork. David tried not to show his surprise as he shook her hand and caught for the first time just how blue her eyes were behind her designer glasses.
“Reza Tabrizi, it’s great to meet you in person,” she said with a friendly wink.
David froze. Only a handful of people knew his alias. How did she?
“It’s okay, David,” Murray assured him. “Eva’s a first-rate agent and actually helped develop your cover story with Jack several years ago. She’s been keeping an eye on you ever since.”
“Is that so?”
“It is,” she said confidently, setting her leather organizer on the desk, then looking David in the eye and recounting his alias from memory. “Reza Tabrizi. Twenty-five. Your parents were Iranian nationals, both born in Tehran. You, on the other hand, were born and raised in Canada, in a little town just outside of Edmonton, Alberta. Your father worked in the oil sands industry. Your mother ran a little sewing shop. But your parents were killed in a small plane crash just before you graduated high school. No siblings. Few close friends. You’re a computer genius but a bit of a recluse. No Facebook page. No MySpace. No Twitter. After your parents died, you didn’t want to stay in Canada. You decided to come to Germany for college. Got a degree in computer science from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich. Now you work for a rapidly growing German company, Munich Digital Systems. They develop and install state-of-the-art software for mobile phones and satellite phone companies. You’re a relatively new but increasingly successful sales rep. The company executives have no idea you’re actually an American. They certainly don’t know you work for the CIA, and they’d fire you immediately if they ever found out.”
Eva stopped for a moment and asked, “How am I doing?”
“I’m impressed,” David conceded. “Please, go on.”
She smiled. “You carry a German passport. You’ve got a Swiss numbered account where we send you funds. You’ve got a storage facility in Munich where you keep weapons, false documents, communications gear, and other essentials. Since August you’ve been working mostly with Mobilink in Pakistan, building up your field experience, working your contacts, establishing your cover, racking up some frequent-flier miles, taking down quite a few bad guys, and probably having a little fun along the way.”
She paused and raised her eyebrows. “Am I wrong?”
David suppressed a smile. “No comment.”
“That’s plenty,” the DDO said. “Please, take a seat, all of you.”
David wondered when he was going to learn even a fraction as much about Eva Fischer as she’d just rattled off about him, but he guessed this was not exactly the right moment to ask. There were more important issues on the table, like somebody’s crazy idea of taking him off the Karachi initiative just when it was actually bearing fruit. Was that Zalinsky’s doing or Murray’s? And what on earth for?
30
CIA Headquarters
Langley, Virginia
“You’re going to Iran,” Murray said.
The sentence just hung in the air for a few moments.
David Shirazi stared at Murray in disbelief, then at Zalinsky, and back to Murray. “When?”
“Seventy-two hours,” Murray said. “Your code name is Zephyr.”
God of the west wind? They had to be kidding.
“What’s the mission?”
“Jack and Eva here will walk you through the specifics,” Murray explained. “But the short version is this: we need you to penetrate the highest levels of the Iranian regime, recruit assets, and deliver solid, actionable intelligence that can help us sink or at least slow down Iran’s nuclear weapons program. We’re currently positioning NOC teams throughout the country ready to sabotage facilities, intercept shipments, you name it. What we don’t have is someone inside giving us hard targets.”
David tried to process what his boss was saying, but it was such a radical departure from what he had been doing that he couldn’t imagine it working. Sure, his family was Iranian, but he had never set foot in the country. Yes, he spoke Farsi, but so did eighty million other people in the world. What’s more, he’d just spent the last several years studying Pakistani, Afghani, and al Qaeda leaders, organizations, and cultures. He was increasingly an expert in such matters and thus increasingly valuable in an intelligence agency that still hadn’t caught bin Laden all these years after 9/11. As for Iran, he neither understood the first thing about Persian politics nor really much cared.
“I’m sorry, sir,” David said after a few more moments of reflection. “That’s not what I signed up for.”
“I beg your pardon?” Murray said, clearly in no mood for a discussion on the topic.
“Sir, with all due respect, I was recruited to hunt down Osama bin Laden and bring you proof of his death,” David told the Agency’s number-two official with a depth of conviction that surprised even him. “That’s what I was trained for. That’s what I’m finally getting the chance to do. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I was born to do. I’m sure you have your reasons, and I’m grateful that you would consider me, but I’m not interested in changing assignments. You’ve got the wrong guy. It’s just that simple.”
The look on Tom Murray’s face said it all. The man was not happy. “Agent Shirazi, I really couldn’t care less why you think you were recruited for this Agency,” he explained through gritted teeth. “We bought you. We trained you. We own you. Period. You got it?”
This was no time to argue, David concluded. “Yes, sir.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Murray got up, stretched his legs, and walked over to a window overlooking snow-covered woods. “Osama bin Laden is still a serious threat to this country and our allies. Don’t get me wrong-I do want his head on a platter, and this Agency is going to get it done on my watch. But while in public this administration is focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the director and I believe the most serious threat to our national security and that of our allies in the Middle East at the moment is Iran. We know the Iranians are rapidly enriching uranium. We know they are planning to use that uranium to build nuclear weapons. We know time is running out. And if we don’t stop the Iranians from building the Islamic Bomb, do you have any idea what’s going to happen?”