The Natanz Directive Read online

  The Merry Times was the domicile of one Arman DiCiccio, a man I had befriended during my first op, over three decades ago. Arman had gotten wounded in a crossfire outside a Newark nightclub, shot in the thigh and stomach by his own people. His subsequent convalescence hadn’t worked out so well. He’d gotten himself addicted to morphine, and that had drawn him here to Amsterdam, the junkie capital of Europe. Since then, Arman had kicked the habit, or so I’d been told. That was the good news. The even better news, for my purposes, was that he had plied his many and varied contacts in the drug business to open up this coffee shop and smoke hole.

  I took a seat near the counter and ordered an espresso from a rail-thin waitress with bronze-and-gold hair. I had a new weapon under my hoodie; Davy Johansen had arranged a pickup the minute I landed in Amsterdam, and his choice of the Walther PPK/S had put a grin on my face. The Walther .380 was my favorite pistol. Davy knew that. What he didn’t know was that he’d earned himself a bottle of fifteen-year-old Dalmore for his efforts.

  Five minutes passed before a curtain of plastic beads guarding the doorway behind the counter parted. A very large, very pudgy man with acres of tattoos limped into the room with a cardboard box in his hands. I studied him with a crooked grin on my face. His thinning, wiry locks were gathered into a ponytail, which only served to emphasize a receding hairline. His forehead was a knob of smooth flesh creased by shallow pink wrinkles. Bushy eyebrows hooded dark, deeply set eyes. It had been years since I’d seen that face and the years had taken a toll, but it definitely belonged to Arman DiCiccio.

  Arman’s arms had once been thick with hard muscle, but these days they were fleshy and slack. He rested the box on the counter and sorted through buttons of hashish in plastic wrappers. I came to my feet and stepped up to the counter. I set a small backpack on the counter and pretended to be interested in the contents of the glass jars in one of the cabinets.

  “Alles wat ik u kunnen helpen met?” he said in Dutch.

  My Dutch being pretty nonexistent these days, I tried a grunt and a short shrug.

  This was a gesture he had apparently witnessed before, because he switched to English and tried again: “Interested in our specials?”

  I removed my sunglasses, kept my voice low as I said, “Got any Specter Six?”

  Arman went statue-still, like his bones had turned to ice, and his face knotted into a ball of hard concentration. Specter Six had been the code name for one of the many counternarcotics teams that I ran back in the day, and Arman DiCiccio had been one of my assets.

  “Damn!” It was a sneer. Then he rose to his full height and spread his shoulders, as if the memories of his past service invigorated him. Well, maybe “service” was overstating it.

  I extended my hand before he could get out another word. “Charlie Green.” Two words and he knew I was undercover, as if my ridiculous outfit weren’t hint enough.

  We shook. I read his grip, looking for signs of anxiety. “How have you been, Arman?”

  His hand was warm and loose, but not without some of its former strength. A good sign. I let it go.

  He smiled and slapped that proud gut of his. “Too good. Way too good,” he said. “Man, it’s been … hell, it’s been a bunch of years.”

  With his gaze fully on me, I studied his eyes: steady and clear. I measured the timbre of his words and found nothing but warmth and camaraderie.

  His gaze flickered to my cap, and the old habits of our clandestine operations came back. He would no sooner give away my identity than he would betray his mother. I had once broken the neck of a Colombian drug dealer who had the muzzle of his Glock .380 screwed to DiCiccio’s temple, and he owed me. At least, that’s what he thought. Who was I to argue?

  He said, “Here on business, Mr. Green?”

  “Always.”

  “I have some kick-ass Purple Skunk in the back. Let’s have a taste.” Arman waved in the direction of my waitress. “Maaje. Mind the store, will you?”

  My old comrade shoved the hashish buttons under the counter and limped through the beaded curtain. I stepped around the counter and followed him into a stockroom thick with the smells of coffee, teas, and hashish.

  Arman continued through another door into a small office. An open laptop sat on a desk between neat stacks of papers and magazines. Muted cheers from a soccer game murmured from a flat-screen TV on the wall. A wipe board on the adjacent wall was covered with columns and numbers listing the shop’s eclectic inventory.

  He stood to one side and ushered me in with a flick of his fingers. He closed the door behind me. I took the pulse of the room; it was three seconds before I judged it clean.

  “Sit, my friend,” he said. I chose a green leather chair with a view of the door. I placed my backpack on the floor. DiCiccio took his place in an Aeron executive chair behind the desk. He propped his right foot on a wooden crate and massaged the bullet wound on his thigh, the product of our last job together.

  “What gives? Mr. Green?” He cocked an eyebrow. I knew he wanted to say “Jake” but stayed with my nom de guerre.

  I inched my chair closer to the desk and winged a thumb in the direction of the TV. “Turn that up a bit, will you?”

  Arman aimed the remote at the flat screen and pumped up the volume. I had no reason to believe that anyone would be eavesdropping on us, but there was no such thing as being too careful.

  He laid the remote back on the desk and knitted his fingers. Then he leaned forward. His voice dropped an octave. “I figured you’d be retired. Not too many guys like you beat the odds.”

  “I was retired. I opted back in.”

  That piqued his curiosity, and he raised his eyebrows, anticipating, I imagined, some type of enticing explanation.

  I dodged his unspoken question and got straight to the point: “I need your help, Arman.”

  He gestured with open hands. “Whatever you need, Mr. Green.”

  “The Iranian opium connection,” I said simply.

  Arman DiCiccio, a veteran of way too many close calls, puffed his cheeks and leaned back into his chair. He exaggerated a long sigh and rubbed his face. Then he leaned forward and anchored his elbows on the desk. “You’re deep in it, aren’t you, Mr. Green?”

  I didn’t answer right away. Finally, I said, “Deeper than you think.”

  Arman DiCiccio’s eyes narrowed, and he hunched over his desk. I sensed a strain of concern. He was putting two and two together. He knew I hadn’t come here to talk about the opium trade. I wouldn’t have come out of retirement for that. He probably also figured that whatever I was up to was bigger than one guy trying to connect the dots between Iran’s stronghold on the opium market and their blatant funding of terrorist groups from Japan to Algeria. That left only one thing: weapons development. When I saw him shake his thick head and massage his ruddy face with two hands, I knew he’d made the connection. “Okay. So, I’ll ask you again. What do you need?”

  “One plus one. A name here in Amsterdam and a name in Tehran. An open door to the money pipeline. Something I can track,” I said. “And I don’t have time to work my way up from the bottom, Arman. Top dogs only.”

  With immense sarcasm, he said, “Damn. Is that all? Hell, why didn’t you say so.”

  I waited. He had every right to be pissed. Here he was, running his little hole-in-the-wall enterprise, just making enough to stay comfortable, and some guy from a past he’d do anything to forget shows up and asks him to ID someone who could put him out of business with a single phone call.

  “This make us even,” he said. “Right?”

  “You’ve never owed me a thing, my friend.”

  DiCiccio smirked. Whispered, “Same old Jake.”

  He clicked the keys on his laptop and turned it around for me to see. The monitor displayed a local newspaper, Schuttevaer. Centered on a page of the business section was a photo of a round-bellied man with a trim beard, and dressed in a dark suit. He stood grinning on a balcony overlooking the city. The caption identifie
d him as Atash Morshed, and the adjoining article described the extraordinary success of his online banking business, investment firm, and brokerage house. Well, I had to give Mr. Morshed credit. What better cover for hiding and diverting money.

  I said, “A well-respected investment banker. Makes sense. Do me a favor. Cut and paste this link into an e-mail message.” I gave him the address of an anonymous Yahoo account.

  He turned the laptop back around and clicked a series of keys. “Done,” he said, then sat back with his hands folded over his belly. “You won’t get close to the guy, you know. Especially now. One of his buddies—a real model citizen by the name of Reza Mahvi—got whacked yesterday in Paris, so his crew has tightened ranks, from what I’ve heard.”

  News travels fast, I thought. But that was no reason to let Arman know that Reza’s death was old news to me. I said, “Thanks for the heads-up. Now who’s the guy pulling Morshed’s leash in Tehran? That’s who I’m really after.”

  “Out of my league.” DiCiccio shook his head. He chewed on his lower lip. He was done talking, I could see that. He said, “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be running a coffee shop on Bloom Straat, would I?”

  Actually, I believed him. And even if I hadn’t, a knock on the office door saved him from explaining himself any further. A crack opened in the door, and I heard my waitress say, “Arman, I’ve got an order here for three ounces of Moonshine Dominator. I can’t find it on the shelves.”

  “Hold on,” DiCiccio called to the door. Then he looked me up and down. “Well, business calls, Mr. Green.”

  “You’ve been a big help,” I said quietly.

  DiCiccio nodded. He reached for the remote and lowered the volume on the soccer game. He rose to his feet and extended his hand. “It’s been a pleasure. Don’t leave town until we’ve had dinner.”

  “I’ll try,” I said, taking his hand. I pumped it once. I was a nice invitation, but we both knew I was the last person on earth Arman DiCiccio wanted to have dinner with just now. “Keep your head down.”

  “You, too. Good luck, Mr. Green.” He pointed to the back door. I scooped up my backpack and let myself out. A cobbled alley led me back to Warmoesstraat Boulevard and tourists trying to look discreet as they prowled among Amsterdam’s many temptations.

  I turned south and settled my pack on my shoulder. Now I had to throw Atash Morshed’s name into the National Security Agency’s hopper and hope that their computers could find a link with that one special name in Tehran; they’d know by the amount of money that was being funneled through this special person’s account. The rest was up to me.

  The safe house the MEK had procured for me was on Bergstraat, but I never intended to use it. Instead, I’d paid cash for an upper-floor room in the Golden Dutch Hotel on Singel. It was a twenty-minute walk from Arman DiCiccio’s café, and I spent most of that time checking my tail. There were bicycles by the hundreds on the street, and this added to my dilemma.

  It’s hard not to love Amsterdam. They say it began as a medieval fishing village. Thankfully, the canals are still there to remind you, and the extraordinary quality of a floating city prevails. These days it still holds on to a good amount of the seventeenth-century magic of its heyday, and the buildings that crowd the canals look as ancient and proud as the stone they were built from.

  The Golden Dutch Hotel was one of these buildings, though half of its patrons were full-time residents. I used the back stairs instead of the lift and climbed to the fifth floor. A musty scent followed me to room 523, and I used my key to let myself in. I went straight to the window. I studied the street, then the Singel canal. The banks were cluttered with colorful houseboats, and a floating market was bursting with the colors of what looked like a million flowers.

  I sat on the bed and used the iPhone to activate the secure linkup to route my call through the CIA’s encrypted connection. I sent a conference request to General Tom Rutledge. The text reply came back immediately: confirmed. Good, I thought. He was making the mission his top priority, and I guess that only made sense.

  The conference-call program gave a beep prompt, and I oriented the iPhone toward me. Rutledge’s face appeared on the screen. A sheen of sweat glistened on his forehead and a white towel was draped over his shoulders. The collar of his gray U.S. Army T-shirt was ringed with perspiration. It was 1416 hours here in Amsterdam. With the six-hour time difference, I must have caught him in the middle of his morning racquetball game.

  He looked at me and said, “Things are well?” He would never use my name, and I would never use his. No matter how secure the line was supposed to be, you didn’t use names.

  “Smooth as silk.”

  Tom nodded. This was his way of acknowledging the hit against Reza Mahvi. Even though the video of our call was highly encrypted, a man in Tom’s position couldn’t afford to implicate himself on a sanctioned assassination. I waited. He wiped his face with a corner of the towel. “Lay it on me.”

  “I’ve got a lead here in Amsterdam. Look for the info in five. I need our friends at Fort Meade”—in other words, the NSA—“to give it an Alpha Sigma Nova priority. My instructions will be in the e-mail.”

  “Done,” he answered. “What’s the terrain like?” By this he meant the danger level.

  “Pretty flat right now. But I’m on for tea in the afternoon.” This confirmed my meeting with the MEK’s leadership in two hours. “I’m going on a walkabout after this call.”

  “Good. Keep me posted. Anything else?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Then I’m out.” The call disconnected and the screen went blank.

  I composed the e-mail and forwarded the information on Atash Morshed. The NSA had decades of practice tunneling into banking operations, but even their supercomputers would take time. I’d check on their progress later.

  I didn’t want to talk to Deputy Director of Operations Otto Wiseman, so I sent him a voice text. Three words: See Tom Run. In other words, “Talk to General Tom Rutledge. He’ll give you an update.”

  Last but not least, I sent a text to Roger Anderson, my longtime contact here in Holland. It read: On track. Drinks at ten. This confirmed our rendezvous at a dive bar we both knew called Tracks at 1800, two hours earlier than my message suggested. His reply was instantaneous: With bells on.

  After closing the communication links and the associated apps, I put my Jerry Garcia cap back on, hitched my pack over my shoulder, and went outside for a recon of the area. I strolled in what seemed an aimless pattern along the canals and made my way toward the center of Amsterdam. I did a couple of tourist things. I bought coffee from one street vendor and a braut from another. But it was all for show. I was on the prowl, vigilant, wary, suspicious of even the most ordinary of details. So I spotted the two guys following me fairly quickly.

  They were good. Not great, but good. Did that make them MEK or DDO or someone else? I couldn’t tell.

  I ducked into a pub and headed to the men’s room with my backpack. I swapped my hoodie for a blue golf jacket, my denim cap for a khaki hat with a floppy brim, and the mirrored sunglasses for tortoise-shell wraparounds. I stared at myself in the mirror. It was a simple but effective change, from stoner to tourist.

  I used the back door and walked halfway down the alley. I entered a second pub via the kitchen, gave a nod to a startled chef, and ordered a glass of Rauchbier from the bar. I carried it out to an empty table on the outdoor patio and slouched in a chair. I sipped the beer, toyed with my iPhone, and watched the people coming my way.

  The two men strolled on the adjacent sidewalk. They had glossy black hair, swarthy complexions, and trim beards; definitely Middle Eastern, but Amsterdam was replete with them. Their gazes swept the patio and passed over me. One of them was talking on a cell phone as they passed by.

  He was speaking Persian. Mine was still a little rusty, but I understood him when he said, “We’ve lost him.…”

  CHAPTER 6

  AMSTERDAM—DAY FOUR

  I
watched the two men halt at the entrance to the pub’s patio.

  The one with the cell phone was doing more listening than talking now, which meant that someone was not real happy. The questions I was asking myself were pretty straightforward. Who did these guys work for? And who was giving them hell right now on the other end of the phone?

  I’d been tag-teaming with a couple of Wiseman’s Amsterdam agents since I’d arrived, and they were waiting for my call in the lobby of the Amsterdam Hilton. So I felt relatively confident in assuming that these two were not more of Wiseman’s men; and that if they were, then the deputy director of operations was not playing it straight with me.

  I had to assume they were MEK. If so, I had a problem. My meeting with the MEK leadership wasn’t for another hour and twenty minutes, and the location hadn’t even been confirmed yet.

  The two men passed through the patio and entered the pub. I put my glass of beer on the patio table and left. I crossed the street and watched the pub from inside a souvenir shop. I scanned both sides of the avenue, checking for signs of a second team: a shadow checking to see if the first team was being shadowed, so to speak. This was typical overkill in the cloak-and-dagger business; if you didn’t know if you were being tailed, then you shouldn’t be in the business. Fortunately, these two were alone.

  They reappeared outside the pub less than a minute later, looking confused and pissed. The taller of the pair made another call on his cell phone. I took three pictures of the pair with my iPhone for later reference and waited.

  It was a short call and very one-sided. The two hurried away from the pub and headed north. I stepped out of the souvenir shop. When they were halfway down the block and had put a good number of pedestrians between us, I started after them. They were still on the hunt, heads swiveling, peering into every storefront, stopping at every intersection and gazing down every alley.

  I stayed with them, a half block behind, wary of the possibility that they could be leading me into a trap. At Bloedstraat, they turned left. Here the street narrowed through a residential neighborhood restricted to foot traffic and bicycles, and there were plenty of both. The tightly packed apartment buildings made this place way too convenient for an ambush. I watched their progress from the end of the street. I had no intention of venturing forward until I was dead certain of what they were doing.