The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,140

in time to block the way of the general counsel, who had been apprised that the FBI’s new poster boy was on the seventh floor.

“You are in deep water, shipmate. Do you know that the Bureau was over here this week? They want to open a criminal investigation on you.”

“For what? If I’m allowed to ask.”

“Espionage, treason. Hell, I don’t know. They seem to think that you have been operating as an agent of a foreign power, whose capital is London. On some Iranian caper. Is that true?”

“Yes, sir, more or less. I told you I was going to contact the Brits. They had the assets in Iran and we didn’t. Remember? We talked about it.”

The admiral shrugged. He was wearing a white shirt that had his gold stars on a neat board attached to the epaulettes. They looked like little shoulder pads.

“I don’t know what I remember. I’ll have to talk to the general counsel. But you, Harry, you had better get a lawyer. The FBI is serious. The deputy director spent an hour with me. They have some tipster in London who is shitting all over you. Names, dates, photographs. Someone has set you up, my friend.”

“Yes, sir. I know. You don’t know the half of it, actually. But as you say, that’s my problem. I’ll sort it out.”

The admiral looked relieved. He absentmindedly took another of his endless supply of ship models from the front of his desk. This time it was an Aegis-class guided missile cruiser. The admiral turned it over so that he could look at the underside of the hull, as if checking for barnacles.

“Good. Well, I wish legal problems were your only difficulty, but they’re not. The White House is ready to pop on Iran. I have been holding them off the past two weeks, as I promised you I would—I do remember that—but they have run out of patience. I got an earful from Stewart Appleman this morning. They are ready to go public, with everything. Damn the consequences.”

“And what will the White House do then?” asked Harry.

“An embargo of Iran, sea and air. If the Iranians resist, they’ll bomb. They’re going to announce the embargo in three days. Bombing is just a matter of time, I reckon.”

“But they don’t need to bomb anything. The Iranian program is falling apart. They don’t know which end is up. They’re shitting bricks in Tehran. That’s what I came here to tell you. We should just let them self-destruct. An American attack is the only thing that will save them. You know that.”

“Sorry, not my department. I don’t do policy.”

“But you’re the CIA director.”

“So? That doesn’t count for much, if you hadn’t noticed. But why are you so sure the Iranian program is falling apart? Did you get that from your agent Dr. Ali?”

“He’s dead. That’s part of what I came to tell you. He died a hero, truly. And he did something so sweet before he died that the Iranians shouldn’t be able to run a glow-in-the-dark watch for a while, let alone build a nuclear weapon.”

The director put down the Aegis ship model.

“Uh, perhaps you had better explain, Harry.” He buzzed his secretary and told her that he wasn’t to be disturbed until he said otherwise, and when she asked if that even meant the general counsel, who was practically beating down the door, he said that it meant especially the general counsel.

So Harry told the story of what he had been doing over the past several weeks, leaving out only the parts that would get him into irreparable legal jeopardy, and the parts involving Kamal Atwan, which he intended to handle on his own. He described his operational planning with Adrian Winkler at SIS to get Dr. Ali out of Iran for debriefing. He explained how the team from the Increment was recruited and sent in to exfiltrate Dr. Ali so that Harry could meet him in Turkmenistan. He explained bits and pieces of the sabotage operation—telling the director enough so he could understand that Dr. Ali’s messages really had been a confirmation not that the Iranian program was succeeding, but that it was failing. And why.

And finally, Harry described what had happened a few days before in Mashad. The CIA’s agent—the brave young scientist whose real name was Karim Molavi—had agreed to go back into the heart of the Iranian nuclear beast to sabotage a secret outpost that was Iran’s ace in the hole. He had died on his way out,