The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,136
within the past forty-eight hours. It didn’t work at first, but Reddo made a phone call to a friend at NSA and played around with the search parameters until he had something for Harry to look at. And you could see it, when you put in the right keywords, just looking at the list of intercepts that came up. They were pulsing their system: Frankfurt, London, Dubai, Beirut. They had code breaks for only some of the traffic, but even where they couldn’t read it in plain text, the traffic analysis suggested that key people—known members of Iran’s secret establishment—were being pulled out of their normal positions and brought home.
On a hunch, Harry called the cybergeeks at the Counter-Terrorism Center and asked them to do a quick check of all passengers who had traveled to Tehran from Europe the past two days. Get the names and match them up with any known intelligence, security, or defense people. It came back in an hour, and it confirmed what the SIGINT had indicated—that a lot of very senior people were being called home in a hurry.
Marcia stuck her head in the door. Harry could smell the cigarette smoke on her clothes. She really wasn’t supposed to do that, but it wasn’t a night in which he wanted to enforce the rules.
“It’s getting late,” she said. “You should eat something.”
“I’m not hungry. Go away.”
“Tough shit, Harry. I brought you something anyway from the cafeteria. It’s not very appetizing, but that’s life.” She handed a tray through the door and dropped it on Harry’s desk. It was a bowl of pea soup and a cheeseburger. Harry ate it all, gratefully.
What about Ashgabat? The Iranians had to be mobilizing there. They would have found the Mitsubishi van that had crashed the border, and the dead Turkman driver. They wouldn’t learn much, but they would realize that Molavi had been smuggled into the country from Turkmenistan before the botched attempt to exfiltrate him. That would scare Tehran all the more. They would pull whatever chains they had in the Turkmen capital to figure out what had gone down.
Harry phoned the chief of the CIA’s two-person station in Ashgabat, a woman named Anita Pell. It was already early morning there, but she sounded as if she had been awakened from a deep sleep. Poor Anita. He hadn’t informed her that he had been in Turkmenistan, and he didn’t do so now. What would he tell her? He had gone there as an operative of a foreign power, Great Britain.
Harry asked Anita Pell to call her liaison officer in the Turkmen security service, right now, and request any information they had about unusual Iranian activities the last few days.
“And wake him up?” Anita Pell sounded shocked. Yes, Harry said, wake him up now, and go see him as soon as he’ll receive you. Send anything you get, as soon as you get it.
Harry felt sorry for her. She had been the only officer to bid for Ashgabat when it came open last year. Her husband had run off with his secretary eight months before, so she said yes. Turkmenistan had been a nice, easy nap until this moment, when all the shit in the world had come down on her head.
Two hours later, Harry had his Ashgabat file. The chief of the Turkmen security received Anita Pell himself—that was a first. He reported highly unusual activity at the Iranian embassy. The lights had been on all night the past two nights; the Turkmen guards posted outside said people had been coming and going constantly, and that the Iranians were burning documents inside the compound. What’s more, the Iranian consulate on the Turkmen side of the Saraghs border crossing had been working nonstop, too, and several dozen Iranian security officials with diplomatic passports had come across the border two days ago, questioning their contacts on the Turkmen side.
“The Turkmen want to know if they can help,” Anita explained on the secure phone. “The chief was very agitated. He said something big went down on the border a couple days ago. He seemed surprised that I didn’t know anything.”
“Stay tuned. It will all become clear. Either that or it won’t. But however it plays out, you’re going to need some help. I’ll send you one of my kids tomorrow.”
Anita Pell protested that she didn’t require any assistance, thank you very much, but she sounded