Free The Tehran Initiative by Joel C. Rosenberg

contained in the report. But the bottom line was clear enough. The warhead had worked perfectly. The blast yield had been extraordinary. The design they had bought years before from A. Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program, had been a good investment after all. They weren’t ready to attach any of the warheads to the high-speed ballistic missiles they had built themselves or bought from the North Koreans. Indeed, the report indicated the team still felt they were many months away from perfecting a missile delivery system. But that was okay. For now, Hosseini concluded, he had what he needed. What’s more, the report promised him that within roughly another three weeks, six more warheads would be built and ready for use.
    Not all the news was good, however.
    For starters, Dr. Mohammed Saddaji, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, was dead, killed by a car bomb in Hamadan just days before. Saddaji’s death was a huge blow to the weapons program. The pioneer of Iran’s clandestine Bomb-making program, Saddaji was nearly irreplaceable. It was still unclear to Hosseini how Saddaji’s activities had been discovered by whoever had assassinated him. He had held the fairly innocuous title of deputy director of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran and had ostensibly been in charge of day-to-day operations at the Bushehr reactor, the nuclear power plant located near the Persian Gulf that was about to go online that spring after years of delays and technical complications.
    Most of Hosseini’s closest advisors were convinced that the Israelis were responsible for Saddaji’s death. The charge made for good propaganda, and the Supreme Leader encouraged them to feed those rumors to the blogosphere and the Western media. But Hosseini had a source he trusted who told him it was the Egyptians who had murdered Saddaji. What’s more, the source indicated that the order for the hit had come directly from President Abdel Ramzy. Was it true? He had no idea. How could Ramzy have found out? It did not matter. All that mattered to Hosseini was retribution, and now he had taken it.
    But there was more bad news. Saddaji’s death, the nuclear test beneath Alvand Mountain, near Hamadan, and the subsequent earthquake in the area had drawn unwanted attention. Now Hosseini’s intelligence chief believed that Facility 278, Iran’s top-secret nuclear weapons development complex, located forty kilometers west of Hamadan and built into the side of the 11,000-foot mountain, had been compromised. The site was surely being watched twenty-four hours a day by spy satellites from nearly every country possessing such technology, and most definitely the Americans and the Zionists. This was a huge problem, the report in Hosseini’s hands noted, because most of the warheads were still being housed there—not all, but most. They needed to be moved fast and without international detection. They needed to be moved into position to be used, in accordance with the Mahdi’s explicit instructions. But how?
    * * *
    Syracuse, New York
    The stunned look on his father’s face pained David.
    He hadn’t wanted to hurt his father or add to his many burdens. He hoped he had done the right thing. But as the two men sat together in silence, David’s anxieties began to grow. Was it anger he detected in his father? Disappointment? Resentment? The man was hard to read.
    One thing was clear: Dr. Shirazi clearly believed his son’s story, even if David had left out a few key elements. David hadn’t shared with his father the fact that Jack Zalinsky had been the one to recruit him to join the CIA, nor that Zalinsky had been responsible for his training. He hadn’t revealed any of the operational details of his life in the CIA, like the fact that his apartment in Munich was just a front or that the name most people knew him by these days was Reza Tabrizi.
    “So how long have you been in the CIA?” Dr. Shirazi asked.
    “A few years,” David said. “I’m not allowed