60

Hamadan, Iran

Mohammed Saddaji finished eating and paid the bill.

He cherished every moment with his daughter, but it was time to get her home and get himself back to the office. His staff was waiting, and the moment of truth was rapidly approaching.

“Are you ready to go?” he asked, signing the credit card slip and taking one last sip of water.

“Do we have a second for me to freshen up?” Sheyda asked.

The answer was no, but Saddaji couldn’t refuse his daughter’s requests. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll go get the car and pull it around front.”

“Thanks, Daddy. I’ll meet you there in a moment.”

Saddaji nodded and sighed, then checked his watch the moment Sheyda headed into the ladies’ room. He pulled out his cell phone and checked his messages. There was one from his brother-in-law. That would have to wait, he decided as he speed-dialed his secretary instead. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said. “Tell everyone to be ready to meet me in the conference room. We’ll go over the final checklist and give out assignments.” Then he tossed a few extra coins on the table for a tip and headed outside.

For February, it was actually quite a lovely day. The sun was bright. Only a few stray clouds could be spotted. The air was warmer than usual for this time of year—about fifteen degrees Celsius, Saddaji guessed. But he didn’t care about the clouds or the sky or the temperature. He was fixated on the honors that were about to be bestowed upon him.

The irony, he mused as he headed for his car, was that Iran had actually launched its nuclear research program with the help of the United States of America in the 1950s. It wasn’t Ayatollah Khomeini who had first fostered the notion of a nuclear-powered Iran. It was President Eisenhower and his “Atoms for Peace” program. It was, however, Khomeini who later clandestinely authorized a military track to run parallel to the civilian track. Since then, Tehran had spent hundreds of billions of rials to buy the people, parts, and plans it needed from the French, the Germans, the Russians, the North Koreans, and Pakistan’s A. Q. Khan in an effort to establish a viable nuclear weapons program. Iran had spent an even greater fortune building research and production facilities all over the country. Many of them were buried deep underground or beneath mountains, in hopes of hiding them from the prying eyes of U.S. and Israeli spy satellites as well as protecting them from a first strike by either or both.

The crown jewel of the public version of the program—the one they allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect—was the civilian nuclear power reactor and research facility located in the city of Bushehr, not far from the eastern shoreline of the Persian Gulf. But there were scores of other facilities, from the ten uranium mines scattered across the country, to the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran’s Center for Theoretical Physics and Mathematics in Tehran, to the uranium enrichment facility in the city of Natanz, to the plutonium enrichment facility in the city of Arak, to the newly built—but not yet operational—uranium enrichment facility on a military base near Qom, to the facility in Esfahān converting yellowcake uranium into uranium hexafluoride, a critical component in the nuclear fuel cycle, to name just a few.

Saddaji was in charge of them all, including the top-secret facility in Hamadan where the weapons were actually being built. He wasn’t doing it for money; they didn’t pay him that much. He wasn’t doing it for fame; almost no one in the country knew who he was. He was doing it, to be sure, for the intellectual challenge of it all; this was surely the most complex engineering program in which he had ever been involved. But most of all, he was doing it to help Persia once again become a great and mighty empire and to prepare the way for the Mahdi.

Still, despite all of his hard work and sacrifice, it was difficult to imagine that he was actually living in the generation that would see the messiah arrive, much less that he was about to be honored by a personal meeting with the Promised One. As he jangled his keys in his hand, he knew he shouldn’t have said anything to Sheyda, certainly not at a public restaurant, but he simply couldn’t help himself. He was walking on air. He was dying to tell more people, including his staff. He wouldn’t, of course. He knew the risks, and he was proud of himself for his restraint thus far. But he could trust Sheyda. He always had.

Saddaji rounded the corner and spotted his beloved black, two-door Mercedes-Benz CL63 AMG. He could never have afforded it on his director’s salary, of course. After all, the car retailed in Europe for more than 100,000 euros. He had never even dreamed of owning such a lavish treasure, but it had been a gift, and who was he to say no? It had been given to him personally the previous year by the Supreme Leader himself after Saddaji and his team had demonstrated that they had successfully brought fifty thousand centrifuges online. The faster the uranium was enriched and the purer it became, the happier and more generous the Ayatollah became, and Saddaji could still remember Hosseini putting the keys in his hands and encouraging him to take a test drive. He had trembled at the very thought and still shook his head in amazement every time he started the engine. The car was a symbol, in so many ways, of how right he had been to leave Iraq and come back home, and a symbol of how successful he had been ever since. And no one deserved such a gift more than he, Saddaji told himself.

He unlocked the car, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him. As he sank into the soft leather seats and ran his hand across the dash, savoring the entire experience—the look, the feel, the smell of this Mercedes—he said a silent prayer, thanking Allah for giving him the great privilege and joy of helping his people, the Shias, build the Bomb.

He sat in the sunshine for a moment and closed his eyes. He tried to imagine the ceremony that was just another week or two away now. He tried to imagine what it would be like when his eyes saw his Mahdi. But when he put in the key and turned the ignition this time, nothing happened. The car neither started nor sputtered. That was odd, he thought. He pumped the accelerator a few times, and as he turned the key again, the car erupted in a massive explosion of fire and smoke that could be heard on the other side of Hamadan.