The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,101
idea. Hundreds of millions of dollars change hands in these deals. In the case of one item the Iranians particularly wanted, the price tag was half a billion dollars. How do you put a price on such an item? It is a matter of life and death, sir. So I—we—charge them what this most unusual market will bear. And we are generous with our friends and business partners. Always.”
This line of discussion was grotesque to Harry. It is inevitable in a business that involves the systematic bribery of others that there will be a residue of corruption that sticks. But Kamal Atwan’s operation seemed to have taken this to an entirely new level. Harry wondered not whether his friend Adrian Winkler was part of the business plan—that was already obvious—but whether the chain of partners in the firm extended upward, to Sir David Plumb, and perhaps others, higher still. He honestly did not want to know the big picture, so he focused on the details.
“How do you ship the equipment? Not from Britain, I assume.”
“Of course not, my dear. It comes from a hundred different places. It is smuggled and sold and resold. We have witting cutouts, unwitting cutouts. We use every bit of artifice you can imagine, and then we add another layer or two. Our advantage is that we know what the Iranians want, and we know how to insert ourselves into the supply chain in a way that will, eventually, intersect their purchasing network. It’s not for everyone, this sort of business, oh no. We know the sort of people whom the Iranians are likely to trust. We know who to pay, and how much. So the business gets done, you see.”
“And the equipment you sell, how well does it work?”
At this, a smile came over Atwan’s face, and then he began to chuckle aloud, and soon Adrian was laughing, too.
“How well does it work? That is very good, Mr. Fellows. It works, at first, exactly as it should. As the purchaser expects. But then, a month or a year later, it begins ever so slightly to deviate from the proper performance. But how can the purchaser tell? If a watch tells you it is eleven-fifteen, how are you to know that it is really eleven-sixteen, if you don’t have a second watch? And then it’s eleven-seventeen, and eleven-thirty, and so on. A year into a project, our miscalibrated equipment will have deflected you a bit from where you should be. And five years on, it will have deflected you a good long way. In ten years, you would be totally lost, I should think.”
“So you’ve been sending this defective equipment to Tohid. And to other Iranian companies, I assume.”
“Oh yes, we have quite a number of buyers. But you are quite wrong to describe the equipment as defective, Mr. Fellows. It operates precisely as designed. It’s just that the design was a bit mischievous.”
“Okay, let me add this up,” said Harry. “An Iranian scientist sends us information saying that his lab has tested a neutron generator of the kind that could be used to trigger a nuclear weapon.”
“Yes, very good. Very useful for you. A bit problematic for me. Potentially bad for business, but never mind that.”
“Bad for business? How?”
“Never mind, my dear. Just a joke. Really.”
Atwan laughed; Adrian laughed. Harry continued with his questions, not understanding Atwan’s comment, but not paying very much attention to it, either.
“Okay. So according to my Iranian scientist at Tohid, the neutron trigger didn’t work the way it was supposed to. The test failed. But if his lab was using some of your, let’s say ‘reconfigured’ equipment, then it’s possible the test never will work out right. Because all the measurements are screwed up.”
“Not ‘possible,’ my dear, but ‘likely,’ I should say.”
“So instead of setting off alarm bells, the report from this Iranian agent should actually be reassuring. Is that right?”
“Oh yes,” said Atwan. “Very reassuring. Unless the Iranians for some reason came to doubt the accuracy of their measuring equipment, they would stumble on inconclusively for years and years, trying and failing and never understanding why. And buying more equipment, of course, to hedge their bets.”
Atwan smiled with the air of a businessman contemplating a cash flow that would continue for decades.
“Feel better now, Mr. Fellows?” said Adrian. “A little less hot under the collar? Perhaps even happy that the firm of Atwan and Winkler has been managing your interests?”
Harry contemplated the complexity of the operation Atwan had described.