The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,26

realizing it. The return message had scared him off. Or worse, he had been discovered. But now he was back.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Get it out of the system, right now. Give it a scrub. I’ll be back in Washington tonight.”

“What’s the rush? I thought you were on vacation.”

“We won’t get another chance like this. If it’s our man, we need to reel him in quick.”

Pappas drove the Jeep Cherokee back to Washington that afternoon. He apologized to his wife, but she was almost relieved. Harry was lost when they were alone. He had been away for a full year, in 2004, when he was in Baghdad. Now he was away even when he was at home. She had her own life. She taught at an elementary school in Fairfax. She spent her days around children, which helped take her mind off her dead son. She was going to yoga classes, and she had joined a book group where they drank wine and the divorced women talked about their sex lives. And she had her daughter Louise—“Lulu”—though the girl had become withdrawn since her brother died, as if she blamed the parents.

Harry said he would be back that weekend to pick Andrea up. She said that would be wonderful, but she knew she would be getting a ride home with friends.

Harry went straight to the office. He blew into the main entrance, past the guards and the electronic entry gates. There was a warning sign in C Corridor, FOREIGN LIAISON IN AREA, and he saw a group of visitors he guessed were Malaysian or Indonesian, tidy little men in black suits. He bowled past them, up the ramp way into Persia House. His secretary had already left for the day, but the luminous, cherubic face of Hussein watched over the entry room. He went into his office, closed the door, and logged on to his secure computer.

When the new message came up, Pappas drank it down like a shot of whiskey. The message was in English, written in a kind of business code, as if the sender were discussing a commercial transaction. It began with an apology.

We are sorry. We received your message about sheet-metal orders, but we could not respond as you requested. Also, we do not like Hotmail anymore. We worry that our business competitors may be curious. We will use our own system. We will share an email account. The address is [email protected]. The password is “ebaga4X9.” Do not send messages to or from this account. Write messages, and save them, and we will look in the “saved messages” space. We are sorry that we cannot meet with you. It is not good business. You do not know this market, but we know. Do not contact us in any other way. We will arrange the business, not you. We cannot travel to other markets. We are very sorry, but it is not wise.

The message continued with some sentences in Persian. Pappas showed the text to an Iranian-American woman who had been cleared for the SAP. She said after an hour’s study that they were lines from Ferdowsi, perhaps the most famous poet in Iranian history. The translation read as follows:

He said, “Is it good or ill these signs portend?

When will my earthly life come to an end?

Who will come after me? Say who will own

This royal diadem, and belt, and throne.

Reveal this mystery, and do not lie—

Tell me this secret or prepare to die.”

The email also contained a technical document. That was the prize. That was what changed everything.

Pappas waited for Tony Reddo and Adam Schwartz to analyze the details. They were seated at the little conference table in his airless office, studying the paper and trading quick technical comments that Harry didn’t understand. He tried to read the cable traffic from Dubai, but he couldn’t concentrate. Finally Schwartz spoke up.

“This is a big deal,” he said. “In fact, if it’s what we think it is, it’s a really big deal.”

“So what is it, goddammit? Don’t play with me, boys.”

“Do you know what a neutron generator is?” asked Reddo.

“It’s something that generates neutrons,” said Harry in exasperation. “That means no, I don’t know what it means.”

“A neutron generator is one of the ways you trigger a nuclear weapon.”

“Well, holy shit! That’s what this is about?”

Schwartz and Reddo both nodded.

“This is a lab report,” said Schwartz, the MIT whiz kid who worked for Arthur Fox. “It describes a test in which the researchers tried to make