The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,123

strangers, ever, but especially not today. He was waiting for the time when he could finish his work and be done.

The Ardebil laboratory was quiet in midafternoon. Some of the researchers had left for lunch. Others were at their desks playing computer games. As in government labs around the world, people were passing the time waiting to go home. Reza escorted Karim down the corridor to the neutron research area where they had once worked together. The door was locked electronically, and marked with signs in Farsi warning against entry by unauthorized visitors. A security officer sat at a metal desk just outside. He was reading the football scores in the local newspaper, but when he saw Reza and Karim he snapped to attention.

The guard was glowering. His mustache was twitching from side to side. Didn’t Reza know that no visitors to this part of the lab were allowed? Karim studied his face. He thought he recognized him from the old days.

“Ali?” he asked. “Is that you? Don’t you remember me? The boy from Tehran who kept blowing the fuses?”

The guard stopped twitching and stroked his beard. “Dr. Karim?” he ventured. “You have come back?”

“Just for a day. I’m here to see Reza and my family, and then I go home.”

The guard ventured a smile. “Haale shoma chetoreh?” And how are you?

“Khubam—shoma chetori?” Karim returned the greeting, and they wished each other good health.

“Can he come in?” asked Reza.

“Of course. We know him. He has to sign the book.” He pushed a book toward Karim, who signed his name and his pass number.

They walked into the forbidden space, past the little office Karim had once used. The exterior wall had once been just past his cubicle, but now it had been extended. There was a door, but it wasn’t locked or guarded. This was the new wing Reza had been talking about.

“Come on, Karim.” His friend tugged at his arm. “You’ve got to see this.”

Inside the new wing, on a table in the center of the room, was the precious neutron generator. The metal was still shiny, and it looked as if it had just recently been uncrated. It was a small cylindrical object, no longer than a foot. At one end was a thick metal casing, with a hole where the explosive trigger was inserted. In the middle was the electromagnetic generator that turned the energy of the explosive into an electronic charge that could ionize the deuterium packed inside and accelerate it toward the tritium target. For all the complicated machinery, it was a simple physical process: the deuterium-tritium reaction produced a surge of neutrons—which could then bombard the plutonium core of the bomb and initiate the fission reaction. The result was a fearsome weapon, with the energy of the sun condensed into a few hundred kilograms.

“Not bad!” allowed Karim. “It’s like the one we have in Tehran. Only it looks newer.”

“And better, my brother. Soon we will be doing the work. You will see. You big boys in Tehran get the glory, but your work never turns out right. So now it is time for the Mashad team to teach you a little physics.”

“Where did you get it? I thought we had the only one at Tohid.”

“Shhh!” Reza put his finger to his lips. “We assembled it inside. That’s the thing. We bought the pieces abroad and put them together. Nobody had done that before, my brother. And I helped. Your friend Reza, who wasn’t smart enough to get a fellowship to Germany. What do you think now?”

This was the Reza that Karim remembered. Cocky and competitive. The young man who had to show you that no matter what you had done with your computer, he could do it better on his. The two of them had wasted many evenings writing graphics programs on the big simulators to pass the time—daring each other to import pornographic images from the Internet and send them anonymously to the bearded ones who rode herd on the scientists.

“You are dreaming, Reza. There’s no way it works better than our machine in Tehran. We may have a few bugs in the engine, but you haven’t even turned on the motor.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are becoming Plan B, my brother. We are the new Plan A. Wait and see. You will be lucky if you can get your old job in Mashad back, when they close everything down in Tehran.”

Karim scoffed. “How? With computers that don’t work? With software you don’t understand? I