The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,12

carefully. And then we start generating the traffic to tell everyone he was a phony.”

Fox’s eyes narrowed tighter, like a cat that hasn’t made up its mind whether to eat the food or bolt.

“Just one more question,” said Fox. “How are we going to use this guy, once we get started?”

“Very carefully. So we don’t get him killed.”

“Don’t overdo the tradecraft stuff, Harry. We need information. This is a big one. We need to exploit it now, for all it’s worth. Assuming it’s for real.”

Harry shook his head. Wrong. Fox’s bravado was the kind of talk that got agents killed.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Harry said. “We’re going to be smart. And we’re going to be patient. And we’re going to remember that there is a human being on the other end of that email address. And we’re going to make sure that whatever we tell the White House is true. How’s that?”

Fox shrugged. Pappas didn’t get it. The message had changed the stakes. This wasn’t about what the CIA wanted. This was going to ring the bells downtown. But he did as Pappas suggested. The White House was briefed, but cautiously. The tear-sheet version was that a new Iranian source said the Iranians had passed the enrichment level needed for civilian nuclear use and were moving toward weapons-grade level. The new source also indicated the possibility of an Iranian heavy-water reactor program. The report was unconfirmed. The source was of untested reliability. His identity and bona fides were unknown. The agency was working to confirm and evaluate the reports.

What they put in writing, in official channels, was all true. But Pappas suspected that Fox was already talking behind his back, spinning the information with his friends downtown nearly as fast as the rotors on those Iranian centrifuges. That was what Fox did. He lived to make trouble other people would have to fix.

TEHRAN

The setting summer sun glittered in the western windows of the young scientist’s apartment in Yoosef Abad. He put his feet up on the coffee table and tried to relax. The stereo was playing a CD by a folk group from the Persian Gulf called Jahleh, which had won a prize at the Tehran Independent Music Festival. They were hip, but also safe. That was his protection—to be ordinary. Deceit was a habit; you put it on and took it off like a suit of clothes. That was his ritual each morning when he rose and prepared for work, and each night when he came home to this apartment. But what was normal? Was it to be afraid or unafraid? Was it to remember things or forget them? He took off his coat. His father’s gold cuff links shone with the same faint light as the disappearing sun.

He was restless. He rose from the leather couch and walked to the small study where he kept his computer. It was a Mac PowerBook, only six months old. It had cost him over four thousand dollars at Paytakht, a Tehran store that managed to import, with a hefty markup, most of what you could get in Dubai. When he bought it, he had imagined that it was an escape hatch that would allow him to leave the velvet prison of his “special” job and flee to other worlds. The computer was so fast, and with his new satellite connection, he could land on any virtual space he liked. In the beginning, it had been exhilarating. But now he was frightened of the computer. The Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard had its IP address, just as they had the coordinates of anything else that was officially connected to him. He had to live outside his body now, in the shells of other creatures.

The young man walked to the bookcase and took down one of his parents’ photo albums. They had been shutterbugs, his mother and father. They seemed to buy a new camera every other year, and miles of Kodak film—always Kodak, his father didn’t trust the Japanese. Some of their devout Muslim friends said it was a profanation, to make these images, but his father just laughed. These were the jahiliya, the ignorant ones. They thought they could dam up the sunlight, and make day into night.

He turned the pages of the album. There were pictures of his mother and father at their little beach house at Ramsar on the Caspian Sea. His mother looked like a 1960s movie star in the early pictures, dressed in