The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,147
turned and walked toward the door, but Kamal Atwan called after him.
“Before I let you go, my dear, I must ask you one final question. It matters rather a lot to my future business dealings. How did you know that Mr. Sadr here, the Crazy One, was working for me? That was a rather well-guarded secret. Are your technical tools really that good? That would worry me.”
Harry laughed. It felt like the first good laugh he’d had in a very long time.
“What could possibly be funny about that question, my dear?”
“Nothing, except that it shows you’re a sucker.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The truth is that I didn’t know about Al-Majnoun. I guessed. Until you told me that he was your man, I didn’t know for sure. Lucky I was wearing a microphone to transmit the conversation out to my lame-ass CIA colleagues, in case anyone ever needs it. And you know something? With all due respect, you talk too much.”
And now, Harry did leave. Out the double doors of the sitting room, past the Renoir and the Monet, past the butler hovering at the door and into the London evening. It was pissing rain outside. Harry walked several blocks to Piccadilly, where he found a coffee bar. It was filling up with young people coming off their jobs, many of them not much older than his daughter Lulu.
Harry took out his cell phone and placed a call to an old friend at MI5, the British internal security service, whom he had met many years before in Washington. They talked for nearly a half hour, with the other man taking notes, stopping Harry occasionally for details, but finally they had it all straight.
Then Harry called Adrian Winkler. The SIS chief of staff still sounded soggy, little affect in his voice even when he tried to be cheery, and Harry understood that his British friend really had loved Jackie with her crop and riding boots and extraordinary courage. That made him feel sorrier still for Adrian, but it didn’t change what he had to do.
“Your friend Atwan is going down,” said Harry.
“What do you mean ‘going down,’ old boy? That man is the best asset we’ve got.”
“Exactly what I said. He’s going down. It turns out that Al-Majnoun was his man. The guy who killed your team from the Increment was working for your pal. That’s what Jackie was trying to tell you. He’s with him now. Kamal, your pal, is harboring a terrorist. No other way to slice it. And he’s going down.”
The phone went dead for a moment. You could sense the panic on the other end, and also the anger.
“Say it again, Harry. I want to make sure I heard it right.”
“Al-Majnoun is here. He’s at Atwan’s townhouse on Mount Street. You need to call MI5 and Special Branch right now—this instant.”
“Tall order, Harry.”
“Not so tall. They already know. They’re on their way to make the arrests. That’s why I called you, brother. You’ll go down, too, if you don’t get on the phone to 5 and Scotland Yard right now.”
“I see,” said Adrian. The air went out of his lungs for a moment, but he recovered.
“You think you can stop this, Harry, but you can’t. Who do you think keeps Atwan in business? Do you think it’s me? What a joke. I just take some of the loose goodies that fall off the back of Atwan’s truck. He survives here because he has friends, way up, who think he is valuable to the country. For ‘reasons of state,’ old boy. Morality doesn’t enter into it. Nothing you or I can do about it.”
“Yes there is. I’ve already done it. It’s over.”
“It’s never over, Harry.”
Harry ended the call and put the phone back in his pocket. He ordered a coffee, but after taking a sip, he realized he didn’t really want it. It had stopped raining now. He stepped out onto the sidewalk and walked along the gray blocks of concrete, the blinking neon lights of Piccadilly Circus marking his way.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The real Iran will intrigue us for decades, but this novel is about an imaginary country. It is a work of fiction, and none of the characters, companies, or institutions described in this book are real. People who look for real intelligence operations in this invented story will only deceive themselves.
In sketching this imaginary Iran, I received help from a number of people and sources. Azar Nafisi of Johns Hopkins University kindly discussed Iranian literature and gave me fine new translations of the classic Shahnameh by Abolqasem Ferdowsi and My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad. My friend Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace read the manuscript and gave me many good suggestions. Dr. John R. Harvey, a physicist with the National Nuclear Security Administration, helped guide me through the unclassified open literature on neutron generators and other aspects of weapons technology. Other friends and sources who will go unnamed here shared insights about the puzzle of Iran.
In sketching my fictional portrait of Iran, I recalled the sights and sounds of my own two-week visit there for the Washington Post in 2006. I also drew on several excellent books: Christopher de Ballaigue’s In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs offered a brilliant personality sketch of the regime. Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad was a source for some contemporary Iranian slang and Persian poetry, as well as a woman’s view of the Islamic Republic. The Lonely Planet guidebook to Iran was a great source of local lore. And I would have been lost without my Ketab-e Avval “Tehran Directory.”
I offer special thanks once again to Garrett Epps, my closest friend since we met as freshmen in college, who was the first reader of this, as of all my previous books. His friendship bolsters me every day. My friend Jonathan Schiller again offered me a novelist’s hideaway at his law firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner. This book is dedicated to him and Dr. Richard Waldhorn, two dear family friends.
I am grateful to others who read and commented on early drafts: my wife, Dr. Eve Ignatius; my literary agents, Raphael Saga lyn and Bridget Wagner; my agent at Creative Artists Agency, the incomparable Robert Bookman. I am lucky indeed to be back at W. W. Norton, and I thank Starling Lawrence for his fine editing, as well as Jeannie Luciano, Rachel Salzman, and many other friends at Norton.
Finally, for the tolerance that allowed me to continue with my day job as a columnist while I worked on this novel, I thank Fred Hiatt, the editorial editor of the Washington Post; Alan Shearer, who runs the Washington Post Writers’ Group; and most especially my boss and friend, Donald Graham.